Professor David Blight:
In a speech before the Virginia
Secession Convention,
in 1861, in late April,
in the wake of the firing on
Fort Sumter, the newly
elected--sort of
appointed--Vice-President of the
Confederacy,
Alexander H.
Stephens, gave a speech that
became quickly known to history
as his "Cornerstone Speech."
This is Spring, 1861.
Alexander H.
Stephens, a Georgian,
a slaveholder,
an old friend and colleague of
Abraham Lincoln's,
ironically, said the
cornerstone of the Confederacy,
the cornerstone of their
political movement,
was what he called "American
Negro slavery."
It was the cornerstone on which
they had founded their
revolution.
The quote goes on:
"As a race, the African is
inferior to the white man.
Subordination to the white man
is his normal condition.
He is not his equal by nature
and cannot be made so by human
laws or human institutions.
Our system, therefore,
so far as regards this inferior
race, rests upon this great
immutable law of nature."
You always have to get worried
in history when people start
talking about how human beings
or human behavior is rooted in
nature.
But how do we get to 1861 and
that secession crisis with
Alexander H.
Stephens delivering this
Cornerstone Speech,
declaring that,
"Hey folks, it's all about
slavery and its preservation?"
How did we get there?
Today I want to talk about,
we're going to dwell on,
ultimately, the Southern
defense of slavery--the
arguments over time that they
developed,
layer upon layer,
drawing upon earlier arguments
and building them into new
ones--sometimes quite
original--toward ultimately a
virtually utopian defense of
slavery as a perfecting,
perfectible,
if not perfected system.
Now, I want to say one other
quick thing before we get to the
substance.
A thousand times in a thousand
ways anybody who studies the
American Civil War period is
inevitably asked,
"so what caused this war?"
It's, of course,
the question of the first third
of this course.
So what caused it?
Yesterday, on M.L.
King Day, I had the privilege
of being on at least four radio
programs about this new book I
have out called A Slave No
More,
some of them quite terrific.
Minnesota Public Radio does a
fabulous hour-long program.
But one of them was on a
Nashville, Tennessee radio
station, on a program at 5:30
p.m.
called "Drive Time."
And the host was Harry or Pete
or whoever he was--I've been on
too many of these.
The first question was,
"So Professor,
what was the Civil War about?"
Now do that in a sound byte on
a national radio station when
you got two minutes to answer.
"Well Pete, you see,
there was this free labor
system and this slave labor
system," blah-blah blah-blah.
I tried to sound byte this and
I ended up saying something
silly like, "You know Pete,
I'm teaching a whole course on
this."
And I finally just ended that
particular little exchange
before he went on to rant at me
about all that's wrong with
American education by saying,
"Pete, it was slavery."
[laughs]
In Alexis de Tocqueville's
great Democracy in
America, which he published
in 1831,
or published in 1837,
after his famous nine-month
tour of the United States--the
most famous book,
travel book,
ever written about America,
by a foreigner.
In Democracy in America
there's that famous passage,
or passages,
when Tocqueville crosses the
Ohio River,
from Ohio into Kentucky,
from free soil into slave soil,
free state into a slave state.
Tocqueville,
you may know,
didn't spend a great deal of
time in the South though he
traveled all across the South.
He spent at least two-thirds of
his--more than,
about three-quarters of his
time--in the northern states.
But when he crossed into
Kentucky, he wrote this letter
to his father.
"For the first time"--this was,
of course, the French
aristocrat de Tocqueville--"For
the first time we have had the
chance to examine the effect
that slavery produces on a
society.
On the right bank of the Ohio
everything is activity,
industry, labor is honored,
there are no slaves.
Pass to the left bank and the
scene changes so suddenly that
you think yourself on the other
side of the world.
The enterprising spirit seems
gone.
There work is not only painful,
it's shameful,
and you degrade yourself in
submitting yourself to it.
To ride, to hunt,
to smoke like a Turk in the
sunshine, there's the destiny of
the white man.
To do any other kind of manual
labor is to act like a slave."
Now, Tocqueville was of course
responding from his own kind of
French aristocratic heart,
to some extent.
He was drawn in a bit to
certain kinds of Southern charm.
"The whites," he said,
"of the South,
form a veritable aristocracy
which combines many prejudices
with high sentiments and
instincts."
He probably over-judged the
scale of that aristocracy.
"They say, and I am much
inclined to believe," said
Tocqueville, "that in the matter
of honor these men practice
delicacies and refinements
unknown in the North.
They are frank,
hospitable and put many things
before money."
Well, they'd have loved that.
When we start hearing from our
pro-slavery advocates and
writers--they would've loved
that.
Because one of the critiques
that slavery allowed pro-slavery
writers, ultimately,
to make, was a critique of a
certain kind of capitalism,
the greedy, grinding,
aggressive, malicious kind of
capitalism they believed the
North embodied.
But charm alone didn't seem to
make a great society,
according to Tocqueville.
"You see few churches and no
schools here in the south," he
observed.
"Society, like the individual,
seems to provide nothing."
The South would end,
he said, by being dominated by
the North.
"Every day the latter grows
more wealthy and densely
populated while the South is
stationary and growing poor."
Not entirely accurate about
that either, from what we now
know about the profitability of
slavery and the profitability of
the cotton crop.
But he ends that famous section
with this passage.
It is kind of haunting when you
think it's only 1831 when he
writes this, and that Civil War
is still 30 years away:
"Slavery brutalizes the black
population and debilitates the
white.
Man is not made for servitude."
Now, in the South what
developed--and let's define it
at least quickly--what developed
was one of the world's handful
of true slave societies.
What is a slave society?
What do we mean when we use
that phrase 'slave society'?
Essentially,
it means any society where
slave labor--where the
definition of labor,
where the definition of the
relationship between ownership
and labor--is defined by
slavery.
By a cradle to grave--and some
would've even said a cradle to
grave and beyond--human bondage.
Where slavery affected
everything about society.
Where whites and blacks,
in this case--in America in a
racialized slavery system--grew
up,
were socialized by,
married, reared children,
worked, invested in,
and conceived of the idea of
property,
and honed their most basic
habits and values under the
influence of a system that said
it was just to own people as
property.
The other slave societies in
human history--and you can get
up a real debate over this,
especially among Africanists,
Brazilianists,
Asianists and others,
and it's why slavery is such a
hot field in international
history--but the other great
slave societies in history where
the whole social structure of
those societies was rooted in
slavery,
were Ancient Greece and Rome;
certainly Brazil by the
eighteenth and nineteenth
century;
the whole of Caribbean--the
Great West Indies
sugar-producing empires of the
French,
the British,
the Dutch, the Spanish,
and a few others--and the
American South.
Now, there were other localized
slave societies,
surely;
certainly within Africa,
to a certain degree even before
Europeans arrived and certainly
after Europeans arrived,
particularly after the
regularization of the Atlantic
slave trade.
There were certain localized
slave societies in East Africa,
out of Zanzibar by the
eighteenth and nineteenth
century.
There were certain localized
slave societies in the vast Arab
world, in the Muslim world,
well before there was even an
Atlantic slave trade to the
Americas.
But the five great slave
societies were those five.
All were highly profitable in
their primes.
All tended to hinder
technological innovation in
those societies.
All tended to have a high
slave-to-free ratio of
population.
All of those slave societies
had a population of slaves that
was from one-quarter to
one-half, and sometimes more,
of the total population.
In those slave societies,
slaves--as an interest,
as an interest--were both a
political and a great economic
institution that defined ways of
life.
Now, when exactly did the
American South become a slave
society?
Is it 1820--the Missouri
Crisis--in that settlement,
and at least the beginnings now
of a clarity of its expansion?
Or was it more the 1830s when
you've got this booming cotton
production happening finally in
Alabama and Mississippi and
Louisiana?
Or was it 1840?
Or was it really in the wake of
the Mexican War when you get
this massive expansion into the
great southwest and the Mexican
Session--which we'll take up
actually next week?
That's always open to debate,
exactly when the South became a
slave society.
But I think it became,
in most ways and in most
definitions, a slave society
surely by the 1820s or the
1830s.
Now, one aspect of that slave
society then--and I'll focus on
it just at least briefly--is
that as Americans ended the
foreign slave trade--and we did
in 1808--this is,
this month is the bi-centennial
of the legal end of
America's--the United
State'--participation in the
foreign slave trade.
Now it didn't entirely end,
and there were some South
Carolinians and Georgians who
wanted to re-open it,
and a few folks out in
Louisiana, who wanted to re-open
it at numerous times in the
antebellum period,
especially in the late 1850s.
They were the same people who
were always trying to annex
Cuba;
about four times over they
tried to annex Cuba,
and it's still a bit of mystery
how it never happened.
But as the foreign slave trade
was closed off,
for a whole variety of reasons,
only one of which was that
there was this passage,
sort of a vow,
in the original Constitution
that the question would be
re-visited in 20 years,
and 1808 was 20 years.
But as the foreign slave trade
was cut off the domestic
American slave trade absolutely
boomed.
And one of the reasons that the
American South could become such
a profitable slave society,
one of the reasons that the
cotton boom could be the cotton
boom is because one of the
unique features of North
American slavery,
U.S.
slavery, is or was,
that it was the only slave
population in the entire New
World--Brazil managed it now and
then but not in the long
run--it's the only slave society
in the New World where the
slaves naturally reproduced
themselves.
And it has to do with climate,
it has to do with sex
ratio--male to female--it has to
do with diet,
and it has to do with movement.
If Frederick Jackson Turner had
anything right in "The Frontier
Thesis," although he didn't pay
hardly any attention to the
South,
this idea of a safety valve of
a West to move to was surely
there for slavery.
Between 1810 and 1820
alone--this is the decade of the
War of 1812, which caused all
kinds of chaos on the Western
frontier--137,000 American
slaves were forced to move from
North Carolina or the Chesapeake
states to Alabama,
Mississippi,
and other western regions.
That's in the one decade of the
teens.
Then from 1820 to 1860,
the forty years before the war,
an estimated roughly two
million American slaves were
sold to satisfy the need of
slave labor in the great cotton
kingdom of the growing
Southwest.
Now, about roughly two-thirds
of those two million slaves
moved from the Eastern seaboard
or the Upper South to Alabama,
Louisiana, Mississippi,
Texas, Arkansas,
et cetera.
About two-thirds of those went
by outright sale,
by financial speculation,
in now a growing huge American
business of the domestic slave
trade.
By the 1830s,
1840s, there were over 100 men
in Charleston,
South Carolina alone,
making their livings full-time
as slave traders.
Their ads were in the
newspapers every day.
Many of them owned their own
shops and their own--in
effect--jails where they housed
people.
Other cities became major ports
or places of deportation,
for the domestic slave trade.
Richmond, Virginia,
for example,
became a huge slave-trading
center by the 1840s and 1850s.
It had two--depending on when
you look--to three dozen major
full-time slave traders.
One of the richest was a man
named Hector Davis.
Hector Davis owned a two-story
slave auction house and jail on
14^(th) and Franklin Streets,
just two blocks down the hill
from Thomas Jefferson's glorious
capitol building of the State of
Virginia.
Just two blocks down the hill
from that great equestrian
statue of George Washington,
the Founder,
you could find a huge slave
jail owned by Hector Davis.
Hector Davis kept tremendous
records, he kept account books,
huge account books.
And one of those account books
ended up in the Chicago
Historical Society after the
Civil War because it was
confiscated by an Illinois
regiment that took it home.
And I worked with that account
book, because one of the two
slaves I write about in this new
book called A Slave No
More--I publish their two
narratives--was indeed a young
14-year-old teenager,
sold out of North
Carolina--from Snow Hill,
North Carolina,
he was sold in 1860 to Hector
Davis in Richmond.
Hector Davis purchased him for
$900.00.
For about six months Wallace
Turnage worked in Hector Davis's
slave auction house helping
organize the auctions every day.
And one day,
Wallace was told,
"Today, boy,
you're in the auction."
And he was sold for $1000.00 to
an Alabama cotton planter who
came up to Richmond twice a year
to buy slaves.
And 72 hours by train he found
himself on a huge cotton
plantation, near Pickensville,
Alabama, on the--in west
central Alabama,
on the Mississippi border,
at 14-years-old.
More on Wallace Turnage later
in the course.
He'll be sold again,
by the way, a third time,
for $2000.00,
in Mobile, Alabama,
at the Mobile Slave Jail.
I calculated in Hector Davis's
account book that the biggest
week he had--and he had some big
weeks--but he had a week in 1859
where he made a cool,
approximately,
$120,000.00 in profit,
just from selling slaves.
I mean, the equivalent of a
healthy teenage male slave,
if you could sell him for
$1000.00 in 1860--it's about the
same price of a good Toyota
Camry today.
And when I go to the A-1 Toyota
for my service or to buy my new
Camry, which I've done every
four years for the last two
decades,
I don't always think of a slave
market but it does occur to me
that--.
[laughter]
They just sell those Toyotas,
they tell you,
"Here's the price,
we don't bargain."
The South was part of the
westward movement.
For slave children--one other
little point about this,
so we can get a sense of this
system that is now about to be
justified and defended--for
slave children,
between 1820 and 1860,
living in the Upper South or
the Eastern Seaboard,
they had approximately a thirty
percent chance of being sold
outright away from their parents
before they were ten.
Now, just to give you a sense
of how cold and calculated this
business was,
and how in many ways the first
defense or justification of
slavery in America is of
course--it certainly is by the
late Antebellum Period--it is an
unabashed economic defense,
as we'll see.
Ads in newspapers,
like this one in Charleston,
would read, "Negroes wanted.
I am paying the highest cash
prices for young and likely
Negroes, those having good front
teeth and being otherwise
sound."
It's all about market forces
and the health and the condition
of your product.
Probably the best book written
on this, particularly on the
language of the domestic slave
trade,
is Walter Johnson's book called
Soul by Soul,
a book--I highly recommend you
read it sometime in your reading
lives.
But it's amazing to read the
letters and the language of
slave traders when they write to
each other,
the complacency,
the mixture of just pure racism
on the one hand and just
business language on the other.
"I refused a girl 20-years-old
at $700.00 yesterday," one
trader wrote to another in 1853.
"If you think best to take her
at 700, I can still get her.
She is very badly whipped but
has good teeth."
"Bought a cook yesterday,"
wrote another trader,
"Bought a cook yesterday that
was to go out of the state.
She just made the people mad,
that was all."
"I have bought a boy named
Isaac," wrote another trader,
"for $1100.00."
He writes this in 1854 to his
partner.
"Bought a boy named Isaac.
I think him very prime.
He is a house-servant,
first-rate cook,
and splendid carriage driver.
He is also a fine painter and
varnisher, and says he can make
a fine panel door.
Also, he performs well on the
violin.
He is a genius.
And strange to say,
I think he's smarter than I
am."
Truth always creeps through all
of our language--it doesn't
always but sometimes--creeps
through our language,
doesn't it?
Now, how is slavery defended?
In many ways, to say the least.
But I want to give you at least
some sense of the development of
the pro-slavery argument,
the kinds of arguments that
were used, how they changed over
time, who made the arguments.
Now, the best way to begin to
understand pro-slavery ideology,
whether we're in the early
period of its defense in the
1820s--actually,
a quite virulent defense of
slavery begins early,
it isn't something that just
sprung from Southern pens in the
1850s during all this expansion,
it comes very early.
But a framework in which to
understand it is that
pro-slavery ideology was,
at its heart,
a kind of deeply conservative,
organic worldview.
And by that I mean a Burkean
conservatism,
a set of beliefs that says the
world is ordered as it is,
for reasons,
and that human beings ought not
tinker with that order,
very much.
It was a set of beliefs in the
sustenance of a social order as
it is.
It was a belief in a
hierarchical conception of not
only society,
but of people.
That people were conceived,
whether by nature or by God or
even by evolution,
with a certain order to them;
some born to do this and some
born to do that and some born to
do that.
It's an organic conception of
the world.
It just is the way it is.
It's natural.
Remember back to Alexander H.
Steven's cornerstone quote --
he uses the word "natural" twice
in that passage.
This worldview had,
of course, an obsession with
stability.
It's one of the reasons white
Southerners didn't like
reformers.
It's one of the reasons
Abolitionists are dangerous.
What are Abolitionists calling
for?
Upsetting the social order.
They're offering a critique of
the social order,
and they even have the audacity
to talk about good and evil.
It's a worldview often
obsessed, as we said last time,
with notions of honor and duty.
And it's a worldview deeply
rooted in the idea or respect
for tradition;
tradition and social control.
In this worldview,
institutions--human
institutions--evolve only slowly
over time and cannot be altered
by abrupt human interventions.
It's dangerous to abruptly
intervene in the evolution of
human institutions.
Now, think what's at stake here
in this worldview,
especially as we transition
next Thursday to a
developing--though by no means
unanimous or
homogenous--northern worldview
in which reform impulses get
embedded.
White Southern defenders of
slavery were--to some
extent--like other
Americans--products of the
Enlightenment.
Some of them come to really
believe in intellect.
They really do come to believe
in the power of reason,
of human beings to figure out
the universe.
But to figure it out in
different ways.
You can be a product of the
Enlightenment and still be
deeply conservative.
You can be a product of the
Enlightenment,
with a faith in reason,
and not become a Romantic who
begins to believe in the
possibilities of man,
or even the perfectibility of
man.
Conservativism--deep organic
forms of Conservativism--is not
antithetical to the
Enlightenment,
at least not entirely.
Although pro-slavery writers
will become deeply contemptuous
of Natural Law--of Natural Law
doctrine as it can be applied to
the possibilities of man.
Many of them will argue,
therefore, that ideas like
freedom--and that idea of
liberty,
so much at stake in the age of
the American Revolution and
falling off everybody's tongue,
and eventually falling off
their tongues and off their pens
as well, what they're fighting
for by 1861 were their
liberties,
they said, over and over and
over and over again.
But in their worldview,
the pro-slavery worldview,
ideas like freedom and liberty
were simply never absolutes,
and many of them will directly
reverse Thomas Jefferson's
Declaration of Independence and
simply say,
"Nobody is born equal."
They will argue over and over
and over again--some of them
almost in a feudalistic
way--that freedom must always be
balanced with order,
and that order is rooted in
certain kinds of prescribed
stations in life,
for the various statuses of
humans.
Or freedom, they will argue,
must be balanced with
tradition.
The possibilities of freedom
must always, in their view,
be balanced with the world as
it as--not as it ought to be.
They are, therefore,
going to have an extremely
different point of view--from at
least Abolitionists in the
North--on this concept of
equality.
Although a lot of Abolitionists
had their struggles with this
one too.
Southern pro-slavery defenders
are much more likely to stress a
human's duty,
than they're ever to stress a
human's rights.
They believed the world was
made up of a struggle between
human autonomy,
on the one hand,
and human dependency on the
other, and you should never give
up on that dependency.
As early as 1826 an important
pro-slavery writer named Edward
Brown argued that "Slavery,"
he said, quote:
"had ever been the stepping
ladder by which nations have
passed from barbarism to
civilization."
There you have the roots and
the kernel of the so-called
"positive good thesis" about
slavery.
That slavery was a way in which
you sustained a social order,
a way in which you built an
economy,
a way in which you maximized
the possibilities of those who
deserved it, by using those who
did not deserve the same fruits.
Pro-slavery writers,
you have to understand,
had also a really often a
fundamentally different
conception of history itself,
or of how history happens,
than will many eventually
northern anti-slavery
writers--even,
eventually, the political
anti-slavery folks like an
Abraham Lincoln,
who was never a real
abolitionist but did at least
grow up with anti-slavery in his
heart.
Thomas R.
Dew, a very important
pro-slavery writer,
who wrote a whole book in the
wake of the state of Virginia's
debates in 1831 and '32 over
whether to re-write its
Constitution.
And they squarely faced the
question of a gradual abolition
plan for the state of Virginia
in 1831 and '32.
They had been planning to
rewrite their Constitution--an
extraordinary turning point in
Southern history.
The problem was,
of course, Nat Turner's
Insurrection;
it had just occurred in October
of 1831 and they held these
debates in the wake of it.
And Dew wrote a forceful
defense of slavery in the wake
of this, which became kind of a
seminal text for all future
pro-slavery writers.
Among the many things he said,
and that was the simple sense
of how history happens.
"There is a time for all
things," wrote Dew,
"and nothing in this world
should be done before its time."
Now, what would you do if your
parents told you that?
They probably have.
What would you do if your
professors told you that all the
time?
"Stop trying to change things.
Nothing will change before its
time."
You'd probably get bored,
or angry.
Or who knows?
Maybe you would just agree.
I don't know.
Youth are supposed to be
impatient.
Now, there are many ways to
look at pro-slavery.
Deep, deep in the pro-slavery
argument--I'm going to give you
categories here to hang your
hats on--deep in the pro-slavery
argument is a biblical argument.
Almost all pro-slavery writers
at one point or another will dip
into the Old Testament,
or dip into the New
Testament--they especially would
dip to the Old--to show how
slavery is an ancient and
venerable institution.
Its venerability was its own
argument, some said.
It's always been around.
Every civilization has had it.
All those biblical societies
had it.
You can read Jeremiah and
Isaiah and some of the great Old
Testament prophets in some ways
as defenders of slavery.
You can therefore assume it was
divinely sanctioned.
You can also look in the New
Testament for examples of it,
justifications of it.
"Slaves, be honorable,
be dutiful"--be obedient is
usually the word in the King
James--"Slaves,
be obedient to your masters."
Slavery is all over the Bible,
in one way or another.
The Bible, of course,
can breathe anti-slavery into a
situation and it can breathe
pro-slavery into a situation.
A second kind of set of
arguments, I've already referred
to, are the historical ones.
Here it is not just the
venerability of slavery,
how old it is,
but it's the idea that it has
been crucial to the development
of all great civilizations.
That slavery may have its bad
aspects but it has been the
engine of good,
it has been the engine of
empires,
the engine of wealth,
the engine of greatness.
How would you have had Cicero?
How would you have had the
great Roman philosophers and
thinkers?
How would you have had the
great Greek playwrights,
they would argue,
without the system,
the world the Greeks were able
to create with the Helots?
That at the base of all
societies there has to be a
labor system that will support
the possibility of Plato.
Pro-slavery ideology is also
part of--at the same time it's
resistant to--the greatest
product arguably of the
Enlightenment,
and that is the idea of natural
rights;
natural law,
natural rights,
rights by birth,
rights from God,
being born with certain
capacities.
Now pro-slavery writers were
inspired by this to some extent,
but many of them will simply
convert it.
They will convert it--they'll
take portions of John Locke that
they like, and not the
others--and they'll say the real
rule of the world is not natural
equality,
but it is natural inequality.
Humans are not all born the
same, with the same capacities,
abilities.
Now, then there's a whole array
of economic arguments,
and the cynic,
the economic determinist,
simply goes to the economic
conclusions of pro-slavery and
nowhere else.
One of the greatest of these
writers was James Henry Hammond,
a South Carolina planter who
had plenty of mixed-race
children.
He was in some ways the epitome
of the kind of cynical
pro-slavery.
In the end of the day,
he wasn't bothered by morality.
His argument for slavery was
that ultimately it was amoral.
But at the end of the day,
he also essentially made a
property argument or a property
defense of slavery.
He wrote, among other things,
"The means therefore,
whatever they may have been,
by which the African race,
now in this county,
have been reduced to slavery,
cannot affect us since they are
our property,
as your land is your property,
by inheritance or purchase and
prescriptive right.
You will say that man cannot
hold property in man.
The answer is that he can,
and actually does,
hold property in his fellow,
all over the world,
in a variety of forms,
and has always done so."
Thank you very much,
said Henry Hammond,
don't talk to me about property
in man.
Oh, some would get guilty.
Indeed they did.
Some would get worried and they
would discuss slavery as a
necessary evil--this system
entailed upon them.
God, they wished they were
without it.
And some of them,
frankly folks,
were deeply sincere in that.
One of the most famous and one
of the most prolific was a man
named Charles Colcott Jones who
owned a huge rice and partly
cotton plantation system in
low-country Georgia,
just south of Savannah.
He and his family wrote
literally thousands upon
thousands of letters.
those family letters have been
published in a book called
The Children of Pride,
and a brilliant book has been
written about Colcott Jones and
his extended family by Erskine
Clarke called Dwelling
Place.
But one of the fascinating
things about Charles Colcott
Jones--born in the late
eighteenth century,
rises to adulthood by the
teens, 1820s--is he's a classic
example of a highly educated
Southern planter.
He came North.
He was educated in Theology at
Yale for awhile.
He was really affected by it.
And then he went up to Andover
Theological Academy and he
taught there and he was affected
even more, by New England
theologians.
And he began to write back,
first to his fiancée who
quickly became his wife,
Mary, and he was really worried
about all the slaves he owned.
And he writes,
for example,
to Mary: "I am moreover
undecided whether I ought to
continue to hold slaves."
He underlines hold slaves.
"As to the principle of slavery
it is wrong.
It is unjust,
contrary to nature and
religion, to hold men enslaved.
But the question is,
in my present circumstances,
with evil on my hands,
entailed from my father,
would the general interest of
the slaves and community at
large, with reference to the
slaves,
be promoted best by
emancipation?
Could I do more for the
ultimate good of the slave
population by holding or
emancipating what I own?
I know not very particularly
how you feel on this point."
And there are many letters like
that.
He and his wife Mary write back
and forth about how evil slavery
is.
But in the end Colcott Jones
becomes a classic example of the
guilty pro-slavery slaveholder.
He doesn't know how to free
them.
He doesn't know how to go to
emancipation.
Instead he develops a highly
intricate theory of how he's
going to use slavery to save
black people.
He's going to ameliorate their
conditions, he's going to make
their slavery on his plantations
so effective,
so good, such a even joyous
form of labor,
that he will be doing God's
work by improving slavery.
It's a genuinely tragic sort of
story in his case.
There are plenty of pro-slavery
writers who also,
to some extent,
whether out of guilt or out of
awareness,
saw slavery as wrong,
but they saw it as a problem
more for white people than for
black people.
Their concern was not the
conditions of blacks but what
slavery did to whites;
and usually they ended up in
the same situation as Colcott
Jones.
There are many pro-slavery
writers who developed,
like James Henry Hammond,
what I would call the cynical
or amoral form of pro-slavery
argument;
and this is a potent form of
argument when you think about
it.
One of them was a writer named
William Harper who wrote a book
called Memoir Slavery in
1837 or '38.
It's an oft quoted work of
pro-slavery writing.
This is just one little passage.
This is this kind of cynical,
if you want,
defense of slavery.
It is what it is, deal with it.
He wrote, "Man is born to
subjection.
The condition of our whole
existence is but to struggle
with evil, to compare them,
to choose between them,
evils that is,
and so far as we can to
mitigate them.
To say that there is evil in
any institution is only to say
that it is a human institution."
And Harper's writing in the
thir--James Henry Hammond starts
writing in the forties and into
the fifties and he takes it much
further,
and he writes over and over and
over again that,
"The only problem with slavery
in America,"
said James Henry Hammond,
is that too damn many
northerners didn't understand it
is the way of the world as it
is,
and they ought to stop talking
about the world as it ought to
be.
And Hammond even aggressively,
directly, took on Thomas
Jefferson.
I'm sorry, Harper did,
even before him.
Here's Harper on Jefferson:
"It is not the first time that
I have had occasion to observe
that men may repeat with the
utmost confidence some maxim or
sentimental phrase as
'self-evident' or
'admitted truth',
which is either palpably false
or to which upon examination it
will be found that they attach
no definite idea.
Notwithstanding our respect for
the important document which
declared our independence,
yet if anything be found in it,
and especially in what may be
regarded rather as its ornament
than its substance,
false, sophistical and
unmeaning, that respect should
not screen it from the freest
examination.
All men are born free and
equal?"--he says with a question
mark.
"Is it not palpably nearer the
truth to say that no man was
ever born free and that no two
men were ever born equal?
Man is born in a state of the
most helpless dependence on
other people."
And then there's the whole vast
category of racial defense and
justification of slavery.
At the end of the day that's
where Alexander H.
Stephens went,
with his Cornerstone Speech in
1861.
That's where all of them went
at one point or another,
some less than others.
Probably the most prominent
pro-slavery writer to make the
racial case--and they all
did--but probably the most
prominent was George Fitzhugh.
In a book called Sociology
of the South--he's also the
same George Fitzhugh who wrote a
book called Cannibals
All--but in Sociology of
the South,
his famous pro-slavery tract in
1854, he wrote this:
"The Negro," he said,
"is but a grownup child and
must be governed as a child.
The master occupies toward him
the place of parent or guardian.
Like a wild horse he must be
caught, tamed and domesticated.
We find slavery repeatedly
instituted by God or by men
acting under his immediate care
and direction,
as in the instance of Moses and
Joshua.
Nowhere in the Old or New
Testament do we find the
institution condemned,
but frequently recognized and
enforced."
And probably his most famous
line, "Men are not born entitled
to equal rights.
It would be far nearer the
truth to say that some are born
with saddles on their backs and
others booted and spurred to
ride them."
And lastly, there was a kind of
utopian pro-slavery.
It was best exemplified by a
writer in Mississippi named
Henry Hughes.
Henry Hughes was one strange
duck.
He lived in New Orleans,
he was eccentric as hell.
He wrote an amazing diary.
He was a loner.
He urged revival of the
slave-trade in the late 1850s,
and he developed a theory of
what he called warranteeism--w-
a-r-r-a-n-t-e-e-i-s-m.
He said slaves were not slaves
they were warranties.
What he meant was they were the
charges put in the world for
slaveholders to care for,
and if possible,
even to protect and perfect.
He believed in a strong central
state, which was a real
departure for him from the rest
of the pro-slavery writers.
He wanted a strong central
government to regulate
everything.
He wanted huge taxation.
He wanted to build institutions
that would be used for the sole
purpose of perfecting the slave
into the perfect worker.
He was a bit of a mad scientist.
And he was especially obsessed
with racial purity.
His writings are just replete
with his fears about hygiene,
that if white and black people
touched or if they came together
the whites would be soiled,
and that any kind of
intermixing of the races was to
destroy ultimately the
intellect,
the ability,
the capacity of a master race.
He wasn't that widely read,
I must admit,
but it shows us how far
pro-slavery could ultimately go.
In Hughes's vision and Hughes's
worldview slavery was not only a
positive good--it was the
possibility of man finding a
perfected society,
with the perfect landowners
fulfilling their obligations,
supported by a government that
taxed the hell out of them to do
it,
and perfect workers,
would make the South into the
agricultural utopian
civilization of history.
Now, the clock says I've run
out of time.
Let me just leave you with this.
All of that is a way of simply
saying it was a deep and abiding
and well-rehearsed--indeed
thousands of pages were written
in defense of slavery.
It wasn't just a profitable
financial institution.
And if you want to understand
why so many white Southerners,
especially in the Deep South,
went to such great extents to
save their slave society,
remember the kinds of arguments
and language used by its
defenders.
Thursday we'll take up the
North and the critique of this
ideology.
 
