What
was the institution of slavery in the South that is so quickly condemned by the
self-proclaimed defenders of the Rights of Man?
It is a complex thing, brought together from the inweaving of a series
of events and circumstances particular to Dixie, and by no means the morally
simplistic outrage normally presented to the inquirer.
Let
us start at the beginning, with the settling of the Southern colonies, when a
superabundance of land presented unique challenges to the colonists. Rowland Berthoff writes,
The easygoing land policy
even tended to perpetuate the shortage of labor which it was designed to
remedy. . . . The colonial economy obviously needed a class
of immigrant laborers who could not achieve independent landownership, at least
for a period of years. There appeared
very early, therefore, the seemingly paradoxical institutions, in the midst of
abundant cheap land, of white indentured servitude and Negro slavery. Actually there was no paradox: servitude and slavery for some persons were
direct consequences of the excessive opportunity for landownership which most
others enjoyed. Slavery, and with it the
perpetual American dilemma of an unfree caste in a free country, came into
existence precisely because from the outset America was as free a country as it
was (An Unsettled People: Social Order
and Disorder in American History, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 40).
But
contrary to present-day belief, there was little animosity between white and
black in the Southland:
. . . well before the end of the eighteenth
century white and black Americans were inextricably bound together in only
marginally variant forms of speech, religion, and other aspects of a common
culture (p. 43).
John
Devanny explains further,
Mr.
Mariner begins his work on familiar ground already plowed by the likes of
Edmund Morgan and T. H. Breen. He accepts the thesis that Virginia in the
seventeenth century was a society with slaves, but would slowly develop into a
slave society by the middle of the eighteenth century. Yet, even as the legal
status of African American slaves became that of chattel, and the liberty of
free African-Americans came under greater and more onerous legal restriction,
the reality was far “less fixed, much more muddled and fluid.” For example:
slaves received and owned property granted to them by their masters, slaves
often were allowed to hire themselves out and keep a portion of the wages,
slave resistance was significant in both passive and more violent forms, and
segregation was virtually nonexistent. But, dear reader, there is
more. To quote Mr. Mariner,
Blacks
and whites, slave and free, lived in close proximity, knew each other and dealt
with each other on a daily basis. They regularly mingled together, and
sailed together. They went to church together, drank together, and
celebrated together. They hatched crimes together, and stood together
before courts. Not infrequently they lived in the same houses and slept
in the same rooms. (15)
Yet
there is still more. African Americans successfully sued for their
freedom in the county and magistrate courts. (These findings lend support
to the recent findings of Professor DeRosa regarding slave standing and
litigation successes in local, county, and state law courts.) The suits became
more frequent through the eighteenth century. As a result, Virginia’s law
makers passed a law requiring all such suits by African Americans to be in forma pauperis, that is the
plaintiff had to employ local counsel and damages awarded could only total one
cent. Nevertheless, the number of such suits increased, and in some cases
Mr. Mariner found that the in
forma pauperis provision was ignored.
There
were more than enough brutes who treated their slaves badly, but the overall
ethos of the institution of slavery in the South was very much akin to this:
As the proslavery divines
and serious Christian laymen acknowledged, [the Bible] also specifies the
master-slave relation as a trust to be exercised in accordance with the
Decalogue, the standards of the Abrahamic household, and the teachings of
Jesus. The Southern divines had their
work cut out for them, for they could hardly deny that Southern slavery, as
legally constituted and daily practiced, fell well short of biblical
standards. Accordingly, when they
rallied their people to secession and war, they did not blithely assure them of
a God-given victory. Instead, they
warned that, to retain God’s favor in a holy war, Southerners would have to
prove worthy of His trust, specifically, of the trust He had placed in them as
Christian masters. Hence, the divines
called for repentance and reform.
Principal church
leaders—Calvinist and Arminian, theologically orthodox and theologically
liberal—agreed that God, in sanctioning slavery, commanded masters to follow
the example of Abraham and to treat their slaves as members of their household
and as brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord. Two questions haunted the sincere Christians
among white Southerners: First, did not
the actual conditions of slave life in the South significantly lapse from
biblical standards? And second, would
not the changes necessary to bring Southern slavery up to biblical standards in
fact replace slavery with a markedly different form of personal servitude? These questions kept surfacing even in the
texts of those who seemed chary of raising them directly. Prominent Catholics and Jews joined
Protestants in upholding the biblical sanction for slavery while they
complained that Southern slavery fell short of biblical norms (Eugene Genovese,
A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the
Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South, Athens, Ga., U of
Georgia Press, 1998, pgs. 5-6).
Is
this really the epitome of evil? The
forerunner of Nazism as Dinesh D’Souza claims, and other such charges? It is not.
Slavery in the South was an expression of her commitment to the social
norm of hierarchy, the reverence for which was with her from the start, before
African slaves even arrived in Dixie.
Her defense of slavery was part of her defense of hierarchy
overall. Robert Lewis Dabney put it this
way:
. . .
The
rest is at https://usareally.com/2314-slavery-in-the-south
.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
