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Like many Catholic conservatives, I’ve flirted with the idea that the South might represent a culture morally superior to the “Puritan” North, or at least a culture more admirable for its conservatism. No longer. There are various reasons for this, but one is the fact that it strikes me as perverse that so many Northerners who claim to stand up for the rights of their ancestors and of locality are so quick to throw their own Northern, Unionist heritage under the bus in order to support the claims of the South. This reminds me to some extent of liberals’ hatred of Western Civilization and love for the exotic. I’m from the Land of Lincoln, darn it, and for all of the faults of the Union cause and the Lincoln Cult (obnoxious and well-nigh idolatrous, yes, but why is that Lincoln’s fault and not the fault of his fanatical admirers? ), my ancestors were Unionists and fought and even died for that cause. If we are supposed to look past black slavery, racial hatred, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, lynching, anti-miscegenation laws, and segregation when we look at Southern conservatism, I’ll overlook the excesses of abolitionism, the corruption of Reconstruction, and Sherman’s March to the Sea. It’s only fair.
I also have more, well, rational reasons for rejecting claims of Southern superiority. In this article, I will present one: in general, Southern states accepted legalized abortion more readily than did Northern states. I refer you to this map, which shows each state’s abortion laws at the time of Roe vs. Wade (see also the discussion here). You will note that, with the notable exception of New York and Massachusetts, abortion was illegal (I presume with an exception for the life of the mother) in the North. In contrast, almost all former Confederate states had, by the standards of the time, liberal abortion laws. The West and the South, not the North (again, with the exception of New York and Massachusetts), were at the forefront of abortion legalization.
Why might this be? I seem to remember reading somewhere that pro-abortionists managed to legalize abortion in Southern states in the case of rape by raising the specter of black-on-white rape. Note: anti-miscegenation laws were overturned by the Supreme Court (and rightly) in 1967. Soon thereafter, many Southern states legalized abortion, at least in the case of rape. Might this have been a case of giving white women an “out” in case they became pregnant with a black man’s child? You may recall that Richard Nixon, the surprisingly liberal president at the time of Roe v. Wade, said that abortion was “necessary” in the case of interracial sex.
If anyone can find evidence for the argument that Southerners were cajoled into liberalizing their abortion statutes by racist arguments (once again, I did read this somewhere or other), please help me find it.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
Unsurprisingly, I see that we Texans were pretty much in the right on both counts.
I remember General Grant saying that the war we fought with Mexico over the annexation of Texas was the beginning of the Civil War: naked aggression on the part of pro-slavery folks with the goal of expanding the Slave Power and preserving the “peculiar institution.” The Civil War was punishment for the Mexican War: http://www.sewanee.edu/faculty/Willis/Civil_War/documents/Grant.html
Since I’m on an Illinois kick, I’ll mention that I grew up near Galena, where Grant lived. Whenever my family drove “up north” to visit our relatives in Wisconsin, we drove past President Grant’s home. My hometown is also near Dixon, where Reagan grew up and my buddies and I used to hang out. Lincoln and Douglas debated at Freeport, where I attended swimming lessons and our junior prom was held. I have also lived in Hyde Park, Chicago, when Obama still lived there and was running for the Senate.
Can you tell that I’m rather homesick?
The aspect of abortion in the South is an eye opener and my opinion for Grant has gone up a notch. An interesting chapter of the war with Mexico is the story of the San Patricio Brigade. Regarding the South, I think the people you mentioned with high regard for it are considering the culture before the war. After the war came the bitter feelings, along with the Klan, Jim Crow, and segregation. Post bellum the South became quite anti-Catholic. For myself what I admire about the Confederacy revolves mainly around R. E. Lee and his army of Virginia.
As for anti-miscegenation laws, I learned something new. I agree they were rightly abolished, however I remember reading how Saint Francis Xavier would rail against the Portuguese for intermarrying with the natives because the offspring would not be accepted by either community.
“After the war came the bitter feelings, along with the Klan, Jim Crow, and segregation.”
Right, but before the war there was outright slavery based on the premise that blacks could be slaves but white men could not. Jim Crow and segregation still were a step above slavery in terms of the status of blacks before the law. Before we dismiss the violence and fanaticism as post-war phenomena, consider “Bleeding Kansas,” where abolitionists and anti-abolitionists waged war on one another. The “Slave Power” was a pre-war phenomena as well.
Consider the “Cornerstone Speech” delivered by the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens. Stephens claimed that the new Confederacy was premised upon the innate superiority of the white race to the black race. It is a singularly wicked speech. In the course of two paragraphs, Stephens lays to rest a number of pro-Confederate myths. First, he acknowledges that the Founding Fathers abhorred slavery. Secondly, he acknowledges that the Southerners have changed their views of slavery by becoming more devoted to the institution, not the Northerners by suddenly objecting to what they had accepted. Thirdly, he states that the *immediate* cause of secession was slavery, which everyone should know but which many deny. Fourthly, he firmly roots slavery in a theory of racial superiority and inferiority. Lastly, he blasphemously refers to the principle of white superiority as the “cornerstone,” on which the Confederate Constitution, unlike the U.S. Constitution, will be based. He thereby compares the principle of white superiority and black slavery to Our Lord, the chief cornerstone. I quote the speech here:
“But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.” (http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76)
Here are the principles of the Klan, if not the secret Masonic oaths. This not to say that all Confederates (such as Lee & Jackson) felt this way, but the Confederate Vice President did, openly, in an appeal to fellow Southerners. Surely his views are to some extent indicative of the state of public discourse in the South at the time, and it is quite far removed from orthodox Christianity.
P.S. It is only fair to include Stephens’ later comments on his speech (http://www.adena.com/adena/usa/cw/cw223.htm), as well as this review of his career, the objectivity of which I do not vouch for (http://www.etymonline.com/cw/cornerstone.htm). See if these comments and analyses still can explain away Stephens’ speech. In other news, Stephens’ grandnephew became a Jesuit priest and is buried next to General Sherman’s son, also a Jesuit priest (http://www.companysj.com/v131/bluegray.html). Alexander Stephens was a U.S. Representative from and later Governor of Georgia, the state Sherman famously marched through. Stephens, the VP of the CSA, is also famous for criticizing his president, Jefferson Davis, for conscription and denial of habeas corpus. Paleocons routinely savage Lincoln for these same policies while ignoring the fact that the Confederates did the same thing. Stephens also supported peace negotiations with the Union.
“Saint Francis Xavier would rail against the Portuguese for intermarrying with the natives because the offspring would not be accepted by either community.”
St. Francis Xavier opposed marriage between Europeans and Asians, huh? Is there a way to make him the “ironic patron saint” of our Society? :)
Let’s not forget the North’s part in slavery, justified by the fact that it was Biblical for God’s elect to have slaves.
“African slavery is so much the outstanding feature of the South, in the unthinking view of it, that people often forget there had been slaves in all the old colonies. Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant’s Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves.[1]”
“Rhode Island, of course, was among the most active Northern colonies in importing slaves. Between 1709 and 1807, Rhode Island merchants sponsored at least 934 slaving voyages to the coast of Africa and carried an estimated 106,544 slaves to the New World. From 1732-64, Rhode Islanders sent annually 18 ships, bearing 1,800 hogsheads of rum, to Africa to trade for slaves, earning £40,000 annually. Newport, the colony’s leading slave port, took an estimated 59,070 slaves to America before the Revolution. Bristol and Providence also prospered from it.” from http://www.slavenorth.com
I do not forget that. I just find it less important than the fact that the North was also first to abolish slavery and to seek to prevent the spread of slavery to the West. On the other hand, it was the South that ultimately became the citadel for what they regarded as their own Southern “peculiar institution.” They also tried to spread slavery to the West. Between the time when New Englanders imported slaves from Africa (the slave trade ended in 1808) and slaves were common in the North on the one hand and the year 1861 on the other, we saw the Missouri Compromise, the Wilmot Proviso, the Great Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, Bleeding Kansas, and John Brown’s Massacre. It’s pretty clear where the lines were drawn.
You have to see where I’m coming from. I’m not coming at this with public school ignorance. I’ve passed through a pro-Confederate (or at least Copperhead) and paleoconservative phase. I’m not arguing for the ongoing liberal vilification of the South. I’m combatting what I regard as a dangerous trend on the part of conservatives to lie to themselves about the realities of the South. Liberals make a big show of hating slavery and the South and loving Lincoln, so in contrast some conservatives will go all-out to blame every problem in the South on the North. So we end up with caricatures of the Southern racist bigot and the Yankee Utopian meddler. There’s truth on both sides. Abolitionists often held false Protestant and Enlightenment notions of human equality and liberty. Anti-abolitionists were often white supremacists. Some abolitionists and Free-Soilers maintained simultaneously that the races were unequal but that slavery should be abolished (this was Lincoln’s public position). My immediate concern is that I see some Catholic conservatives trying to give the South a pass for evils they would condemn vigorously in the North. I resist this trend. Contrary to the narratives that some conservatives write, the right side does not always lose and the side that loses is not always right.
There’s a proverb to the effect, “Don’t call a badger a bishop.” Badgers fight tenaciously against much larger animals, but that doesn’t make them virtuous. Spunk is admirable and the “Lost Cause” mythology certainly is romantic and appealing. That doesn’t make it morally superior to the alternative cause. After all, the mythology of national re-unification and emancipation is also romantic and appealing. Personally, I think the best thing that ever happened to the Confederacy is that it lost the war. As it was never given a chance to break up into still further fractured units, succumb to British intervention, maintain slavery for a few more decades, or wage war over settlements in the West, we can maintain the opinion that it might actually have worked. As a son of the Prairie State, I think it’s patriotic of me to hold up the Unionist side of the argument and to be more zealous in correcting the errors of those who mischaracterize the war in a pro-Confederate way. I do not deny that it is the prerogative and patriotic duty of Southerners to hold up what is worth salvaging of the Confederate cause and to be more zealous in correcting the numerous errors that liberals and others commit in their analyses of the war.
I see your point, well made. But wasn’t Blessed Pius IX supportive of the Confederacy? And didn’t he send Jefferson Davis a crown of thorns of deep symbolic meaning? Did you ever see that picture of Davis’ home with a rosary hanging on the bedpost?
I agree that there are pros and cons on both sides of the Mason Dixon Line. I think we want to be objective and balance. But before we end, I do think states rights had something to do with Secession and that their were many elements of hypocrisy in the North. If the Emancipation Proclamation had not been proclaimed with so little forethought about such a deep rooted problem, the North may have come up with a better way to integrate blacks into society and avoid the corrupting welfare system. I think slavery was not going to last much longer and if it had dissolved a little more “naturally”—let’s say—both sides would not have become so galvanized. At one point before the war, Virginia came within one vote of abolishing slavery.
Just for the record, there was a ban on Negroes joining the Union Army. “The Lincoln administration wrestled with the idea of authorizing the recruitment of black troops, concerned that such a move would prompt the border states to secede. When Gen. John C. Frémont (photo citation: 111-B-3756) in Missouri and Gen. David Hunter (photo citation: 111-B-3580) in South Carolina issued proclamations that emancipated slaves in their military regions and permitted them to enlist, their superiors sternly revoked their orders. By mid-1862, however, the escalating number of former slaves (contrabands), the declining number of white volunteers, and the increasingly pressing personnel needs of the Union Army pushed the Government into reconsidering the ban.” http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war/ When blacks were allowed into the army they were segregated and were given inferior quarters.
“One case will suffice to illustrate the immensity of Northern hypocrisy in the matter of slavery and race. Outside the South, few today know that Gen. Robert E. Lee freed his slaves before the War Between the States broke out. Even fewer know that Julia Grant, wife of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, still owned three slaves at the end of the war. Two of them were rented out. The third, a female also named Julia, was kept by Mrs. Grant as a maid. When Richmond fell and the war was effectively over, Mrs. Grant traveled down there from Washington, D.C., to visit her husband. She took Julia with her. Thus, at that moment, the only slave in the former Confederate capital who was not freed belonged to the wife of the commanding general of the Union forces!” http://catholicism.org/catholicism-south.html
I know that you are against slavery in Theory but when was the last time you patronized “American Made,” WalMart? :)
“But before we end, I do think states rights had something to do with Secession and that their were many elements of hypocrisy in the North.”
“Something to do” — absolutely. Does this mean that slavery was not the immediate cause of the war? — no. I personally think that Lincoln’s Unionist case against the justice of unilateral secession makes much more sense than the pro-secessionist cause. I don’t see how either side can claim absolute justification under the U.S. Constitution. It was a tragic, systemic flaw in our federal system that the matter of secession was not directly addressed in the Constitution. The South made the mistake of pushing the envelope and the matter ended up being resolved by the force of arms, which is just about how it had to be resolved if it ever was going to be resolved. The Southerners probably would not have had to endure sudden, uncompensated emancipation and the ravaging of their land and the death of their young men if they had decided to stick it out in the Union. They realized their own worse nightmare while ostensibly trying to avoid it. They obviously made a grave mistake.
And once again, my point is that an admittedly hypocritical North does not exonerate the unambiguously pro-slavery South. In the case of the expansion of slavery in the West, one of the biggest causes of the war, the Northern hypocrites simply were in the right, period. And, just as a general point, the hypocritical side is sometimes still preferable to a more self-consistently flawed alternative.
“But wasn’t Blessed Pius IX supportive of the Confederacy? And didn’t he send Jefferson Davis a crown of thorns of deep symbolic meaning? Did you ever see that picture of Davis’ home with a rosary hanging on the bedpost?”
This is an important fact that more people should know about. Davis suffered greatly, and the Holy Father empathized with him. He may well have been a noble leader. His role was tragic. The Civil War was awful and did lead to greater centralization of the government (which would not have happened in the way it did if the South had not seceded). But this doesn’t preclude a Catholic from arguing for the Union. Orestes Brownson was a Unionist, after all.
“If the Emancipation Proclamation had not been proclaimed with so little forethought about such a deep rooted problem, the North may have come up with a better way to integrate blacks into society and avoid the corrupting welfare system.”
True. But in times of war leaders often do such things as offer emancipation to the enemies’ slaves. The Brits did this during the American Revolution, for instance. In order to be effective as an act of war, which is what it was, the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation had to be drastic. Either way, the North was going to emancipate the slaves once the South was defeated. After slavery drove the nation into civil war, it would have been practically impossible to tolerate slavery after the war ended.
“I think slavery was not going to last much longer and if it had dissolved a little more “naturally”—let’s say—both sides would not have become so galvanized.”
It’s obvious that a more “natural” dissolution of slavery would have been better. But who was most opposed to this? I challenge your claim that slavery was not going to last much longer. What is the evidence for this? Why is this more than wishful thinking? I don’t see how Southern public opinion would have permitted this. They actively were trying to spread slavery to the West in order to prop up the system. They also had won the Dred Scott decision and were avid in seeking fugitive slaves. Alexander Stephens seems to have thought that slavery was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. If pressure from the North wasn’t going to change Southern devotion to slavery, I can only see a British boycott of slave-produced cotton and tobacco doing the job. I’m interested in hearing how abolition might have taken place in the South without outside intervention.
In the progressive British Empire and Catholic Latin America, slavery could be abolished peacefully. In Protestant Anglo-America, particularly the retrogressive South, I don’t see how this was going to be.
“Just for the record, there was a ban on Negroes joining the Union Army.”
I acknowledge this record, just as I acknowledge that it does not establish moral equivalency between the Union and the Confederacy. It’s worse to keep men in involuntary slavery on account of their race than to exclude them from the military on account of their race.
“I know that you are against slavery in Theory but when was the last time you patronized “American Made,” WalMart? :)”
I’m not “against slavery in Theory.” I admit that slavery may be moral. I don’t even claim that every Southern slaveholder was at fault for holding black slaves. What I am opposed to is a theory and practice of slavery that is based upon the un-Catholic notion that one race of men may be slaves while another may not. I admit everything you say and worse about the Union, but the Union cause was still better. Or at least the Southerners were chiefly to blame for seceding so wrecklessly (it was certainly wreckless, even if they had the legal right to secede, which I do not concede), to their own detriment, to a large extent in order to safeguard the evil institution of black slavery.
Yes, I go to Walmart. Paying your workers less than you should is still superior to holding a black man in bondage because he’s black. If we found out that Walmart held actual, honest-to-goodness slaves, we’d all find that worse than paying cheap wages. As for their trade with China, yes, to some extent I’m complicit in the terrors of China. But I’m complicit to the extent that British people in the 1800s were complicit in slavery when they wore Southern cotton. Not to the extent that Southern anti-abolitionists were complicit. To turn the argument around, if I’m in the wrong for buying goods produced by slave labor in China and sold by underpaid workers, the Southern anti-abolitionists were quite wrong for supporting a system of involuntary, race-based chattel slavery.
To sum up, neither the North’s hypocrisy nor my own hypocrisy establishes a moral equivalency that excuses the “peculiar institution” of racial slavery or renders the reality of the Confederacy (as opposed to their rhetoric) all that appealing. In addition to that, I reject secessionism as a recipe for chaos. And had the South not seceded, Unionist centralization might not have occurred at the same level of intensity.
For the record, some of my ancestors were tobacco planters who held slaves in colonial Maryland. I don’t know whether my ancestors from North and South Carolina and Missouri held slaves or not. The slaveholding branch of my family eventually moved north to Wisconsin and became staunch Unionists; my great-grandmother’s older brother, Marcus Tullius Cicero Copper, died while serving in the Civil War. One of my Pennsylvania Quaker ancestors apparently helped a fugitive slave escape on the Underground Railroad. My great-great-grandfather in that line also fought for the Union. I think some of my Iowa German ancestors also served. So I have slaveholders, Underground Railroad participants, and Union soldiers in my lineage. So it’s not like I exempt my ancestors from any censure.
And I note: it’s not like the Southerners seceded when the North tried to pass some sweeping, revolutionary abolition act. They did not wait for this to happen. Rather, they seceded because they lost a presidential election. One presidential election. What could Lincoln have possibly done in four years of peaceful administration that the South did not permit him to do in four years of war? I certainly do not see how Lincoln could have passed an abolition act by 1865. He might well have been voted out of office in 1865 if the South had stayed in the Union. A peaceful, negotiated, gradual emancipation might well have been possible — had the South stayed in the Union and negotiated with Northern abolitionists. After all, up until the Dred Scott decision, the history of slavery had been one giant history of giant compromises. When the South felt that they actually were going to have to change their own way of life (in a good way) as a result of these compromises, they decided to leave the Union. Arguably, Southern secession is precisely what prevented a “natural” death of slavery. After the Northerners had put up with so much by compromising with the South (the fugitive slave acts required them to return captured slaves to their owners, after all! which practically legalized slavery in the North), secession truly must have been an insulting slap in the face.
On the other hand, the increasingly strident abolitionists of the North might not have wanted compromise. John Brown certainly didn’t. However, I think that level heads would have prevailed had the Southerners been on board for a gradual emancipation. Even Lincoln’s plans for gradual emancipation set the date of final emancipation in *1900.* There would have been about 40 years in which to adapt to the new conditions. Do you think that slavery would have naturally died before 1900? If so, Lincoln’s plan presented no problem.
Additionally, neither Davis nor Stephens nor Lee supported their states’ secession. I agree with them — their states should not have seceded.
Lastly, as Henry Adams notes, the Slave Power (the pro-slavery political bloc within the South) violated states’ rights when and how it wished:
“Between the slave power and states’ rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states’ rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas “by joint resolution” [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision — all triumphs of the slave power — did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states’ rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states’ rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.”
So the Confederate appeal to states’ rights was also hypocritical, for they supported centralization whenever it protected slavery.
I find myself writing a fourth post in a row, but it’s my thread, so live with it.
I have often heard the rumor that Virginia failed to abolish slavery by one vote. Please provide the date and the name of the act and its terms. I recently read here ( http://books.google.com/books?id=wgcOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA177&lpg=PA177&dq=virginia one vote abolition&source=bl&ots=nL_io9IdFu&sig=J-wk3aoReepIKg9O4nZHK_ycOuU&hl=en&ei=luZYSuXQHtH6tgePkpTdCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1 ) that this is just a delusion. The delusion seems to stem from four different votes in the Virginia legislature that dealt with slavery or free blacks. However, abolition never came within a vote of passing.
This is where I read it: http://catholicism.org/catholicism-south.html I don’t know how reliable the author, Gary Potter, is and I don’t see any references.
“A problem it (slavery) was, but contrary to popular notions nowadays, it was the South that first began to grapple with it even as it was the same region that first met and has most successfully overcome the challenges posed by the rise of the civil rights movement in this century. Thus it was that in 1831, thirty years before the outbreak of the War Between the States and at a time when slavery was still legal in Massachusetts, its abolition failed in Virginia by just one vote in the state legislature.”
Thank you, Bonifaci, for discussing this with me in depth. All your points are well taken and I’ll check out some of your references. I especially enjoyed your come back in saying that you are not against slavery in principle; I appreciate the distinction made. It’s great that you know something about your ancestors for I can’t say the same or myself. You may think I’m from the South but no, I’m from Massachusetts—the one and only. It doesn’t get any worse till you reach Texas—just kidding—I mean California. Even then, I’m not sure it’s any worse out there.
All of your points are well taken as well, believe me, so thank you!
P.S. I wasn’t directing the flippant remark “so live with it” at you, Discipule.
Discipule (in case you’re still reading),
As you might have known, Mr. Potter’s article was indeed one of the articles to which I was responding. I noted above that Mr. Potter seems to have repeated an often told but inaccurate account of an attempt at abolition in Virginia. I will note that the following statement is either inaccurate or else is written in a way that might mislead: “A problem it (slavery) was, but contrary to popular notions nowadays, it was the South that first began to grapple with it . . .” Well, seeing as slavery was first banned in the North, in some states during the 1700s (though often it took decades for abolition to be complete), this statement of Potter’s is difficult to understand, at least as far as legal abolition goes. See this article for the dates of official and actual abolition of slavery in the North: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_state Fortunately, I grew up in Illinois, where the Northwest Ordinance (one of the greatest pieces of legislation *ever*!) prevented slavery from ever taking hold, at least among the whites (the French had slaves). We had all sorts of retrogressive race laws (like a law pretty much banning any blacks from entering the state!), but not slavery. For whatever that’s worth.
Discipulus mentioned above that Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. Unfortunately, his source failed to note that Franklin eventually freed his slaves, became an abolitionist, and served as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Here are two texts that he wrote late in life:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Address_to_the_Public
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Plan_for_Improving_the_Condition_of_the_Free_Blacks
I don’t mean this as a criticism of Discipulus. I am merely pointing out that the Southern apologists are as capable of inaccuracy as are vilifiers of the South.
Thank you for the clarification; the article by Gary Potter came up in my search and I more or less skimmed it not knowing you were answering it. I should have checked on Ben Franklin too and don’t mind being corrected. I agree with your points and in the past have been more interested in the war. If you don’t mind my digression, I have a few interesting things regarding Southern Army Chaplains. Fr. James Sheehan, C.SS.R. wrote a great account of what he encountered during the war. It seems he was equally dedicated to the souls of his confederates as he was to the cause. A very strong and forceful man, he one time appeared before Stonewall Jackson who had the same type of temprement and as you know was very zealous in his Protestant beliefs. Jackson was rather urked that Sheehan should intrude upon him with an unusual request. At which point Sheehan said something like, “I have served the army well as you must know and am as dedicated as you to our cause. My job is to take care of the souls of the men and to do that job well, I must be able to come and go as I please without restrictions. I need your authorization to do that.” Whereby Jackson sat down and wrote a personal pass for Sheehan of the broadest nature. At one point Lee singled him out while reviewing the troops and gave him the highest compliment for his dedication.
Of course there was Father Abrahm Ryan–not a chaplain but whose love and patriotism for the South is expressed in volumes of poetry—not my favorite but there are some good ones. And then there is Father John Bannon from Missouri who joined the Southern army as chaplain. There is a book about him entitled, “The Fighting Father Bannon” since he was often on the front line and at one point when a battery was about to be overrun helped with one of the cannons—most likely against cannon law. His heart was with the South but after a battle he would go among the fallen on both sides as you would expect. There are some very moving stories.
Of course the North had Father William Corby of the famous Irish Brigade who after the war ended went back to some college out West. Interestingly at the college the staff was not to favor either side, yet Fr. Corby was asked by Father Sorin to enter the Corp of Army Chaplains for the North, maybe because they were short on chaplains or had more Catholics to minister to. I know both sides could have used more. From the writings and stories of these priests you can get insigths of what kind of men the generals and officers of both sides were as well as the armies in general. What was there attitude to religion and more importantly to Catholicism.
Yes, thank you for that information, Discipule. Maybe I should start another thread about Catholicism in the trenches of the Civil War; it seems no one knows about the potential effect of racism in the pro-abortion votes down South.
On another note, I think that I was channeling my father when I wrote this: “at least among the whites (the French had slaves).” I meant that slavery was not trendy among the *Anglo-Americans* in Illinois. Yes, I know that the French are white! Also, the Indians enslaved their captives, although maybe it would be more appropriate to say that captives were forcefully adopted into the tribe. I’m not sure they were regarded as mere chattels.