In the Land of Cotton: An Immigrant to Dixie Examines the "Lost Cause"
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
by Greg Loren Durand
I was born, raised, and schooled in southern and central California. In the California public school system I was taught that the Republican party, with "Ole Honest Abe" Lincoln at the helm, was responsible for "saving the Union" from those who sought to destroy it in order to perpetuate and extend Southern slavery. As do millions of patriotic American schoolchildren every year, I memorized the Gettysburg Address, listened with rapt attention to stories of the Underground Railroad, and thrilled to read of the military exploits of such Northern Generals as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Influenced by a steady barrage of sixty second sound-bites on the evening news and the elaborate, yet fanciful, "reality" concocted by the movie-moguls in Hollywood, a Southern drawl would invoke instant images in my mind of sheet-clad imbeciles dancing around a burning cross, or some beer-bellied, tobacco-spitting "redneck" hurling racial slurs at "persons of color." The "Mason-Dixon Line" was to me an unscalable wall of separation between the socially sophisticated and open-minded North and the morally degenerate and bigoted South. It was a line I never wanted to cross.
However, about fourteen years ago, I had a "great awakening." Everything that I had been taught about the South and the so-called "Civil War" of 1861-1865 -- more accurately known as the War for Southern Independence -- started to crumble as I began to read what the Southerners themselves had to say. All my life I had been told only one side of the story -- that of the victor. But didn't the "losers" have a story to tell as well? Was the War really fought over the issue of slavery, as most Americans believe, or was it fought for other reasons?
It is estimated that only about six percent of Southerners at the outbreak of the war owned any slaves at all, and an even smaller number were wealthy enough to afford the hundreds of laborers which are often associated with Southern agrarianism. It simply was not possible for the average Southern planter to pay $1,500 in cash (that was in gold, not inflated paper "money") per slave; even those who could were frequently to be found working alongside their slaves. Despite the accounts of Northern Abolitionists of merciless whips and welted backs, of cruel masters and oppressed servants, such were in fact a rarity in the predominantly Christian South. In the late 1930s, the Works Project Administration of the Federal Government collected the testimonies of former slaves throughout the occupied South which are preserved in The Slave Narratives in the National Archives of Washington, D.C. A majority of those interviewed had fond memories of their masters and mistresses on Southern plantations. For example, Mary Rice, a former slave of Alabama, stated, "Slavery times wuz sho good times. We wuz fed an' clothed an' had nothin' to worry about." Tom Douglas, also from Alabama, reflecting on the "emancipation" brought about by the North, said, "I was happy all de time in slavery days, but dere ain't much to git happy over now." Gus Brown of Richmond, Virginia remembered his former master with these words: "I cannot forget old massa. He was good and kind.... I knows I will see him in heaven...."
It must be kept in mind that Scripture nowhere condemns the institution of slavery as such, but only its abuses. In Leviticus 25:44-46, God Himself permitted the Israelites to purchase slaves from the surrounding heathen people and to hold them "for a possession... forever." The New Testament brought about no change, for it instructs slaves to submit to their masters and to view even those who are harsh as "worthy of all honour" (1 Timothy 6:1-5; 1 Peter 2:18). Many Northern Abolitionists realized this and therefore set about not only attacking the Southern planters as the "worst of sinners," but also the Bible itself, denouncing it as "nothing but the obsolete history of a barbarous people" and calling for "an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God."
However, putting the moral debate aside, it cannot be denied that slavery was protected by the "supreme law of the land" -- the Constitution for the United States of America -- and as such, all those who held public office in Washington D.C. were bound by oath to ensure its continued protection. Only a constitutional amendment, proposed by a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the States could bring about a lawful change in that document. Abraham Lincoln knew this to be true, and said so in his first inaugural speech on the steps of the Capitol: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
Lincoln is often portrayed today as the very incarnation of the "American spirit" of freedom and equality and is held up by many Black people as the patron saint of civil rights. However, in his speech at Peoria, Illinois on 16 October 1854, he revealed his true feelings toward the Black man by declaring, "Free [the slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this.... We cannot make them equals." In his reply to Stephen Douglas on 18 September 1858, scarcely five years before he issued his celebrated Emancipation Proclamation and altered the course of the war to an attack on Southern slavery as a calculated "war measure" to cripple the "enemy," Lincoln stated:
I will say... that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, a social and political equality of the White and Black races, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people....
[T]here is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together in terms of social and political equality. And in so much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
In 1858, Lincoln stated his belief that the South was no more responsible for the existence of slavery on American soil than was the North. At the Hampton Roads conference held with Confederate leaders in early 1865, he again declined to blame the South for slavery. It is true that, at one time, every State in the Union condoned and protected the institution of slavery in their constitutions and laws, but what is not often understood is that the African slave trade itself was primarily a Northern enterprise, with the States of Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island as the chief recipients of its financial benefits. On the other hand, the Southern State of Virginia was the very first political body in the entire world to enact legislation to end the slave trade. On 5 October 1778, the General Assembly passed "An act for preventing the further importation of slaves," in which "any slave brought into the state contrary to the law would be then and forevermore free." Other Southern States, such as Alabama, Tennesse, and the two Carolinas, also enacted laws that were hostile to the slave trade; not satisfied with mere legislation, the State of Georgia prohibited the importation of slaves in its constitution of 1798. The trade was originally intended to be abolished when the Constitution went into effect in 1789, but was extended an additional twenty years with the help of the votes of the New England States. Even after it became illegal in 1808, Northern slave ships were still involved in the trade as late as 1861. In contrast, the Constitution of the Confederate States of 1861 permanently abolished the slave trade in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1. This fact alone refutes the common claim that the Southern States seceded from the Union in order to re-open the slave trade and thereby transform both North and South America into a mighty slave empire.
Confederate President Jefferson Davis made clear his hopes for the infant Southern republic when he stated, "The slave must be made fit for his freedom by education and discipline and thus be made unfit for slavery." It was Davis' prediction that slavery "will eventually be lost"; it had outlived its usefulness and would inevitably die a natural death. Although there were indeed some who believed that the natural condition of the Black man was servitude, a widely-held opinion in the South was that of gradual emancipation. Some prominent Southern leaders, such as General Robert Edward Lee, were wholly opposed to African slavery. General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson helped organize a Sunday School for Blacks in 1855 which he continued to support financially during the War until his death in 1863. President and Mrs. Davis rescued a young Black boy named Jim Limber from an abusive guardian and adopted him as one of their own children. Jim lived with the Davis family in the Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia until the fall of the Confederacy in 1865.
Let the reader contrast such sentiments with the actions of the invading Northern army. A military order issued from the United States War Department in March of 1863 called for the conscription of "all able-bodied male negroes between the ages of eighteen and fifty...." An amended order issued the following year authorized the arrest and severe punishment of "the great numbers" of "deserters" who hid or otherwise attempted to avoid being enlisted to fight against their own masters. In a letter to General Ulysses Grant, General John A. Logan reported that his men were "capturing negroes, with or with out their consent." In 1864, General Innis N. Palmer wrote to General Benjamin Butler, "The negroes will not go voluntarily, so I am obliged to force them." General Rufus Saxton reported to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton:
Men have been seized and forced to enlist who had large families of young children dependent upon them for support.... [T]hree boys, one only fourteen years of age, were seized in a field where they were at work and sent to a regiment serving in a distant part of the department without the knowledge of their parents.... On some plantations the wailing and screaming were loud and the women threw themselves in despair on the ground. On some plantations the people took to the woods and were hunted up by the soldiers...."
At the same time Black men were being taken against their will into "service" to the United States, Yankee soldiers were "committing rapes on the negroes and such like things... and no punishment, or none of any account, has been meted out to them." In Alabama, soldiers under the command of Colonel John Turchin "attempted an indecent outrage on a servant girl," and quartered themselves "in the negro huts for weeks, debauching the females." General Saxton reported that "the prejudice of color and race" among his troops manifested itself in "various forms of personal insult and abuse, in depredations on their plantations, stealing and destroying their crops and domestic animals, and robbing them of their money.... The women were held as the legitimate prey of lust...." In a letter discovered in the streets of Columbia, South Carolina after General William Sherman's army had passed through, Lieutenant Thomas Myers wrote the following to his wife back in Boston:
"The damned niggers, as a general rule, prefer to stay at home, particularly after they found out that we only wanted the able-bodied men (and, to tell you the truth, the youngest and best-looking women). Sometimes we took off whole families and plantations of niggers, by way of repaying secessionists. But the useless part of them we soon manage to lose; sometimes in crossing rivers, sometimes in other ways."
It was estimated by Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin that one million Blacks had perished from disease, neglect, and other factors associated with the invasion of the South and a disruption of its institutions. In a letter written to Major Oliver Howard in late 1865, Southern Presbyterian minister Robert Lewis Dabney complained that one-half of the Black population of Louisiana in particular were lying in their graves by the end of the war. Was it really a war over slavery? Hardly.
What then would cause a vast majority of non-slaveholding Southerners, many of whom were as young as fourteen years of age, to shoulder their muskets and charge with resolve into the very face of death? What gave these men the mental fortitude and courage to stand firm in their defiance of the mightiest war machine the world had seen up to that time? I firmly believe that the often starving and bare-footed "Rebels" were motivated by their love for hearth and home. These men deserve to be honored for withstanding tremendous odds in an attempt to secure for future generations of Southerners the eternal "blessings of liberty." In the words of one Confederate soldier: "I was a soldier in Virginia in the campaigns of Lee and Jackson, and I declare I never met a Southern soldier who had drawn his sword to perpetuate slavery.... What he had chiefly at heart was the preservation of the supreme and sacred right of self-government." Even the editors of the London Times acknowledged this to be true when they stated on 7 November 1861, "The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South...."
That is why, upon moving to my adopted and now-beloved Southern homeland, I promptly and proudly hoisted a Confederate Battle Flag above my home. This convert to the "Lost Cause" feels his heart swell with pride and love for the Old South when he sees the Battle Flag floating majestically in the breeze and sometimes even gets a lump in the throat when he hears the sweet strains of "Dixie." My own ancestors "wore the blue," but I now make my stand with the "boys in gray" and wait for the day when native Southerners will no longer be ashamed of their rich heritage and will join with those who are turning their backs on the siren song of post-modern American society in order to return to the cherished principles of the past.
Deo Vindice!
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