Professor Hardwick has spelled out in fine detail, what Edmund Morgan tried to
teach us about Virginia a generation ago.  In American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan wrote
(I paraphrase from memory) "Slavery become a flying buttress for freedom."

Harold


Date sent:              Mon, 03 Sep 2001 20:56:42 -0400
From:                   Kevin Hardwick <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: Fw: Hampton (Virginia) National Cemetary: 757.723.7104
To:                     [log in to unmask]
Send reply to:          Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
        <[log in to unmask]>

> "In this country alone does perfect equality of civil and social privilege
> exist among the white population, and it exists solely because we have
> black slaves.  Freedom is not possible without slavery.  . . . The
> spectacle of Republican freedom and Democratic equality in this country,
> is an eye-sore to an aristocracy [the author is referring here to Great
> Britain] whose system of exclusive privilege and arbitrary distinctions
> rests upon the false assumption of a right to degrade and oppress men whom
> God has made as good as themselves.  The abolition of negro slavery in the
> South would enevitably end in the ruin of the political constitution of
> the country."
>
> Richmond Enquirer, 15 April 1856.
>
> What we see in a quote like this--and this one is pretty much typical of
> the kind of argument prevalent in Tidewater Virginia in the mid to late
> 1850s--is the assertion that a great many good things that Americans today
> take for granted are connected to ownership of human chattel (so long, of
> course, as that human chattel has clearly been cast to an inferior mold by
> God Almighty).  Thus, there is no surface contradiction between the basic
> political values for which a good many patriotic Americans believed they
> were fighting in World War I and World War II, and the values of any
> Confederate soldier who might have agreed with the editor of the Richmond
> Enquirer.  Indeed, as this quote above suggests, racism and the classical
> liberal values which for a great many people are definitive of the very
> best that the American political tradition has to offer can exist hand in
> hand, the one in dependence on the other.
>
> It is not just that some Virginians explicitly stated that they were
> fighting for slavery.  The argument that the Civil War turned on the issue
> of slavery is far deeper than that.  It is not an either/or situation.  On
> the contrary, Southern apologists for slavery argued that all the valuable
> public goods and ideals which Americans care about existed in the South in
> a superior form precisely because Southerners owned slaves.  Thus all the
> honorable things which Deane and others have mentioned as the things for
> which their ancestors fought are entirely compatible with an argument
> which asserts the naturalness and necessity of negro chattel slavery.
>
> Similar arguments to that offered by the Richmond editor were widely in
> print in Virginia--for example, those of Thornton Stringfellow, a Babtist
> minister from Fauquier County, or more notoriously, George Fitzhugh, a
> lawyer from Port Royal.
>
> One final thought--none of the contributers to this discussion so far know
> me anywhere near well enough to predict, on the basis of my arguments
> about the reasons why some Virginians supported the Confederacy, how I
> will vote in the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election.  To assert that
> I must be liberal because I am a college professor, or that I must be
> liberal because I believe that the Civil War was fundamentally about
> slavery, is the height of arrogance.  It is also a form of ad hominem,
> since it reduces to "I don't have to take his arguments seriously, because
> he's obviously a pinko long-haired anti-southern un-American college
> professor."  If we really are going to have a conversation about this, I
> think we need to avoid casting the debate in ideological and personal
> terms.
>
> All my best,
> Kevin R. Hardwick
>
>
> --
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of History, MSC 2001
> James Madison University
> Harrisonburg VA 22807
> Phone:  540/568-6306
> Email:  [log in to unmask]
>
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