"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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