The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death, a South Carolina commissioner told Virginians in February 1861. The South cannot exist without African slavery. Mississippis commissioner to Maryland insisted that slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity. If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his party, the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone. If these warnings were not sufficient to frighten hesitating Southerners into secession, commissioners played the race card. A Mississippi commissioner told Georgians that Republicans intended not only to abolish slavery but also to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races. Georgias commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. An Alabamian born in Kentucky tried to persuade his native state to secede by portraying Lincolns election as nothing less than an open declaration of war by Yankee fanatics who intended to force the sons and daughters of the South to associate with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, thus consigning her [the Souths] citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans... This argument appealed as powerfully to nonslaveholders as to slaveholders. Whites of both classes considered the bondage of blacks to be the basis of liberty for whites. Slavery, they declared, elevated all whites to an equality of status by confining menial labor and caste subordination to blacks. If slaves are freed, maintained proslavery spokesmen, whites will become menials. We will lose every right and liberty which belongs to the name of freemen. -m.theatlantic/business/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations-an-intellectual-autopsy/371125/ youtu.be/Tu3j7rPscpY
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 02:04:06 +0000
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