"A Pro-slavery Crusade"

[whitworth]

As incompetent as the Confederate State Department was, there was no policy to reopen the Slave Trade, or could there be, if the Confederacy wanted the military assistance of Great Britain, in 1861.

Great Britain had a policy to capture slave ships operating out of Africa for some decades. Besides a country without a large representative navy, could not alienate the major naval power in 1861.

[unionblue]

Trice,

I got the book, A Pro-Slavery Crusade, The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade, by Ronald T. Takaki, through an interlibrary loan from the Blazer Library, Kentucky State University, in Frankfort, Kentucky.

I'll be posting from it shortly on this thread.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

[unionblue]

From the Preface of the book, A Pro-Slavery Crusade:

"The Old South, according to Southern legend, was the best of all possible worlds. There were lovely ladies and gallant gentlemen. There were the saucy Scarlett O'Haras flirting with young and handsome Southern Cavaliers at elegant barbecues. There were huge plantations and stately white mansions with Grecian columns and rose gardens and magnolia trees. The planter aristocracy was full of splendor. And the slaves were a happy people. There were the old plantation mammy, who was lovable and loving, and the butler, dedicated and polished. Then there were the field-hands who sang as they picked cotton. In this Old South, there were also poor whites, content with their whiskey and simple mountain life. Here, then, was the great society!

Actually, the legend of the Old South is just that--a legend. It is more fiction than fact. What particularly concerns us here is the legend's description of the planter class as an established aristocracy. No doubt a number of the Virginia and Charleston planter aristocrats belonged to a long line of wealthy planters. But the planter of the Old South was usually a one-generation planter aristocrat--a rough and highly competitive entrepreneur who overcame the frontier and made a huge fortune. He was Wilbur J. Cash's young Irishman. He began as a lowly yeoman farmer in the Carolina upcountry around 1800. One winter he drifted down the river and found the people at the halfway station of Columbia greatly excited about a new invention--the cotton gin. When he returned home, he bought 40 acres of land, and worked hard to clear the land and cultivate the cotton. Eventually he bought a slave, then more slaves and more land, and built a large and impressive house with white columns. When he died years later, he was the owner of 114 slaves, and was remembered as "a gentleman of the old school." Cash's story about the Irishman graphically illustrates the reality of slaveholding social mobility in the Old South. Yet, as even Cash himself recognized but did not fully appreciate, this slaveholding social mobility had begun to freeze before the Civil War. More importantly, many Southerners thought it had. The traditional Southern optimism rooted in the yeoman-to-planter mobility was splintering in the 1850's. This raises highly important and fascinating questions: what happened in the white society of the Old South when the chief basis of economic mobility and the symbol of social status--slaves--were being closed to the white majority? To what extent did the fear of the monopolization of slaves contribute to class conflicts between nonslaveholders and slaveholders below the Mason-Dixon line? How was the agitation to reopen the African slave trade a response to these internal social tensions?

While many Southerners worried about a threatening class upheaval within Southern society, they also felt an anxious concern for a Southern disquietude about the morality of their peculiar institution. As Kenneth M. Stamp, David Brion Davis, and Winthrop D. Jordan have pointed out, the institution of slavery involved a fundamental ambivalence. Slaveholders regarded the slave as property, as a thing. Yet they also regarded the slave as a person, and in certain circumstances the master-slave relationship took place at a human level. While we are not primarily interested here in the ambivalence itself, we are immensely concerned about how this contradiction bothered and gnawed at the Southern conscience, how Southern proslavery radicalism was a response to this Southern moral turmoil, and how the new aggressive pro-slavery ideology of the 1850's--the pro-African slave trade argument--had a psychological function for troubled and uneasy white Southerners. Thus, as we shall see, Eugene Genovese crucially misinterprets the Southern defense of slavery when he states: "Slavery may have been immoral to the world at large, but to these men [slaveholders], notwithstanding their doubts and inner conflicts, it increasingly came to be seen as the very foundation of a proper social order and therefore as the essence of morality in human relationships." The controversy over slavery was undoubtedly a conflict of world views between the South and the outside world. But Genovese fails to appreciate the importance of the struggle of these very world views within Southern white society and in the minds of many white Southerners, and the relationship between this Southern turmoil and Southern militancy against the anti-slavery values of western civilization.

Actually, to an important extent, slaveholders became increasingly committed to slavery as a moral institution because of "their doubts and inner conflicts." They were desperately trying to free themselves from the chains of moral anxiousness based on their ambivalence towards the slave.

Historians have traditionally tended to analyze the Southern pro-slavery movement within the context of the conflict between the North and the South. Obviously we cannot ignore the reality of the sectional crisis. Yet, as Charles G. Sellers and William Freehling have shown in their studies of the Southern defense of slavery, we must also give more serious attention to the inner tensions and problems of Southern society. We must not label this view "guiltomania" and dismiss it as "irrelevant." We must try to deepen our understanding of the Southern predicament and the irony so pervasive in Southern history. This is especially true if we wish to appreciate fully the significance of pro-slavery aggressiveness during the decade before the Civil War.

Thus, in this study of the pro-slavery mind of the South, we shall focus on the agitation to reopen the African slave trade in order to probe a crucial question about the Southern defense of the peculiar institution: how was Southern pro-slavery radicalism of the 1850's not only a reaction to Northern abolitionism, but also a response to the internal crisis of the Old South--a crisis based chiefly on the distressing awareness that slaveholding social mobility was tightening, and on the disturbing recognition that white Southerners themselves doubted the rightness of slavery?"

More to follow...
Unionblue

[trice]

Originally Posted by unionblue

From the Preface of the book, A Pro-Slavery Crusade:...
More to follow...

Unionblue,

Thanks. That's an interesting start. I may have to get this book on loan myself.

The dilemma he is talking about is a well-known one, important but difficult to confront: if slavery is wrong, how can good people keep slaves? Since we know many Southern slaveowners were what would otherwise be called "good people", how did they justify it to themselves?

The answer appears to be that they were human and, like so many of us, found ways to justify to themselves the conflicts in their lives. Religion is important to them, so naturally they must come to terms with the religious and moral aspects of slavery. This struggle is so intense it splits faiths: as the Civil War approaches we see Southern Baptists and Baptists, Southern Methodists and Methodists, etc.

I think many of those Southern slaveowners who professed such beliefs, like Robert E. Lee, that slavery was wrong and would end one day, but that they slaveowner must bear up under it to raise the black race up, etc., were sincere in what they said. I think they were wrong; I think they were misguided; I think the self-justification involved is obvious. But I think many of them sincerely believed in it -- because how else could they live with slavery?

Regards,
Tim

[matthew mckeon]

How can a slaveowner be a good man?

Well, obviously its possible. Slavery was part of human societies in most places. Few people were under the illusion that slavery was a good thing in ancient Greece or Rome, or based on anything but force, but given slavery as part of life, you had the choice on how to act. Is the fact of owning another person and compelling them to labor for you a corrupting thing in itself?

In America, which limited slavery to a certain race, you had a nasty ideology of the slaves being fitted only to be slaves, which is really the worse thing about the United States.

[cw1865]

Originally Posted by matthew mckeon

Is the fact of owning another person and compelling them to labor for you a corrupting thing in itself?

In America, which limited slavery to a certain race, you had a nasty ideology of the slaves being fitted only to be slaves, which is really the worse thing about the United States.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The single worst thing the US did was to the Native Americans; followed REAL close by slavery.

Unfortunately we still live in a society with economic coercion.

[OpnDownfall]

Although the concept of the slave owners of the south bearing up under the burden of the slaves, until they could be brought up to civilized standards, was generally, accepted in the south (at least among the slave owners), however, it is noteworthy that there was also an ongoing debate inside the south as to whether it was necessary or even appropriate to educate the slave and/or whether he should be christianized.

[trice]

Originally Posted by OpnDownfall

Although the concept of the slave owners of the south bearing up under the burden of the slaves, until they could be brought up to civilized standards, was generally, accepted in the south (at least among the slave owners), however, it is noteworthy that there was also an ongoing debate inside the south as to whether it was necessary or even appropriate to educate the slave and/or whether he should be christianized.

Well, one of the obvious sectional differeces of the day was the need for education. We can find letters to newspapers in the ante-bellum days down in the Carolinas where people argued that the average white yeoman farmer had no need for an education either. Meanwhile, public education in the North was becoming mandatory.

One of the ways this shows up is in cadets at West Point. First year cadets from the Northeast were almost always ahead of those from other parts of the country, because they usually had better education when they arrived. Stonewall Jackson was a case in point.

Jackson was from western Virginia and was woefully underprepared for the curriculum when he arrived. Only by dint of incredibly diligent study did he survive that year, finishing at the bottom. However, he applied himself with the noted Jackson discipline, and was 17th of 59 in his class when he graduated (McClellan was 2nd) and there were those who said he might have been first if the school had another year.

Regards,
Tim

[OpnDownfall]

It highlights the question, of how serious the southern slave owners were about their claims of being a civilizing influence on their slaves, when they were not even sure that they should be educating their slaves, or even giving them religious instruction of any kind, much less Christian.

[samgrant]

Originally Posted by ole

With apologies for again diverting attention from the point of the thread: Yesterday I went through the Barnes and Noble store in the largest mall in the country, if not the world. There were 3, 4-foot shelves of Civil War books.

ole

And if it was like my local B&H those shelves were lees than half full. My local Border's must have 8-10 times as many CW books. I generally go to look, not to buy, tho as rarely are anything but "Best Sellers" discounte

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