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Friday, August 23, 2019

The Abolitionist Infidel


Whenever someone takes up a defense of slavery in the South, he is usually given a short hearing due to the many lies and misconceptions about Southern slavery that have been sown abroad by abolitionists and their fellow travelers.  That is unfortunate, for the purpose of such a defense is rather to support the deeper, more fundamental principles at the heart of the debate over slavery and abolition, which still bear heavily on the present.  The Rev Robert Lewis Dabney of Virginia (1820-98) provides a good overview of them in his book A Defense of Virginia and the South (New York, E. J. Hale & Son, 1867; quotes are taken from the copy available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm). 

Doubtless the concepts of authority and freedom are chief amongst them.  One of the key arguments of abolitionists is that slavery violates the right of the slave to his freedom, which the abolitionists claim is the birthright of every man that no one can take away without his consent.  Rev Dabney answers by showing the atheistic foundation of this notion:

The radical objection to the righteousness of slavery in most minds is, that it violates the natural liberty and equality of man. To clear this matter, it is our purpose to test the common theory held as to the rights of nature, and to show that this ground of opposition to slavery rests upon a radical and disorganizing scheme of human rights, is but Jacobinism in disguise, and involves a denial of all authority whatsoever. The popular theory of man's natural rights, of the origin of governments, and of the moral obligation of allegiance, is that which traces them to a social contract. The true origin of this theory may be found with Hobbes of Malmesbury. It owes its respectability among Englishmen, chiefly to the pious John Locke, a sort of baptized image of that atheistic philosopher; and it was ardently held by the infidel democrats of the first French revolution. According to this scheme, each person is by nature an independent integer, wholly sui juris, absolutely equal to every other man, and naturally entitled, as a "Lord of Creation," to exercise his whole will. Man's natural liberty was accordingly defined as privilege to do whatever he wished. True, Locke attempts to limit this monstrous postulate by defining man's native liberty as privilege to do whatever he wished within the limits of the law of nature. But this virtually returns to the same; because he teaches that man is by nature absolutely independent, so that he must be himself the supreme, original judge, what this law of nature is. According to the doctrine of the social contract, man's natural rights are confounded with this so-called natural liberty. Each man's natural right is to protect his own existence, and to possess himself of whatever will render it more happy, (Locke again adds, within the limits of natural law.) And this scheme most essentially ignored the originality of moral distinctions. Hobbes explains them as the conventional results of the rules which man's experience and convenience have dictated to him. For, the experience of the mutual violences and collisions of so many independent wills, in this supposed "state of nature," induced men, in time, to consent to the surrender of a part of this native independence, in order to secure the remainder of their rights. To do this, they are supposed to have conferred together, and to have formed a compact with each other, binding themselves to each other to submit to certain stipulated rules, which restrained a part of their natural liberty, and to obey certain men selected to govern. The power thus delegated to these hands was to be used to protect the remaining rights of all. The terms of this compact form the organic law, or constitution. Subsequent citizens entering the commonwealth by birth or immigration, are assumed to have given an assent, express or implied, to this compact. And if the question be asked, why men are morally bound to obey magistrates, who naturally are their equals and fellows, the answer of this school is: because they have voluntarily bargained to do so in entering the social compact; and they receive a quid pro quo for their accession to it. Such is the theory of the origin of government, from which the natural injustice of slavery is deduced. For, obviously, if man's obligation to civil society originates in the voluntary social contract of independent integers, none can be rightfully held to a compulsory obedience, which enters into all servitude, both domestic and political.

 . . .

Now, it is from this vicious theory of human rights, that abolitionism sucks its whole life. The whole argument is but this: no restraint of government on man's will can be righteous, which is forcible and involuntary, because the obligation of all just government originates in the option of the individuals governed, who are by nature sovereign. Before we indicate the relationship of this conclusion with its disorganizing brood of kindred, we must pause to meet a question which arises. It is this: if this pet hypothesis is relinquished, on what basis shall we defend free government? Let us see if a better foundation for its blessings cannot be found.

--From the section ‘The Rights of Man and Slavery’, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm#Page_241

He goes on to show from whence the principles of authority and freedom actually flow:

 . . . this impotent and infidel theory of government sets out, (as was consistent with its atheistic inventors,) without reference to the fact that man's existence, nature, and rights originated in the personal will of a Creator, without reference to original moral distinctions, or to original responsibilities to God, or to the moral quality of God's will towards man. It quietly ignores the fact that man's will, if he is the creature of an intelligent and moral personal Creator, never could, by any possibility, be his proper rule of acting. It passes over, in the insane pride of human perfectionism, the great fact that man is also a naturally depraved creature. It falsely supposes a state of nature, in which man's will made his right: whereas no being, save an eternal and self-existent God, has a right to exist in that state for one instant. But all these are facts of nature, belonging to the case, ascertainable by experience and reason. If, then, we would have a correct theory of natural rights, all of them must be embraced in our view. And the proper account of the matter is simply this: Inasmuch as man did not make himself, he enters existence the subject of God. This subjection is not only of force, but also of moral right. Moral distinctions are original, being eternally expressed in God's perfections, and sovereignly revealed to the creature in his preceptive will; which is, to man, the practical source and rule of obligation. This moral obligation is therefore as native as man is. The rudimental relations to his God and his fellows imposed on man are binding on him ab initio; not at all by force of any assent of his will, but merely by the rightful force of God's will: man's virtue is to conform his will freely to God's. This will also defines his rights; by which we mean those things which other creatures are morally obliged to allow him to have and to do. Man, we repeat, enters existence with these moral relations resting upon him. And among them, are his social relations to his fellows; as is shown by the fact that he has a social nature. Now civil government is nothing more than the organization of a part of these social relations. God's will and providence, then, as truly as his word, has placed man naturally under civil government. It is as natural as man is. Again: the rule of action imposed by just government is the moral rule. That is to say, an equitable government enjoins on its members or subjects the doing of those things which are morally right, and the refraining from those things which are morally wrong.

We trace civil government, then, not to any social contract, or other human expediency, but to the will and providence of God, and to original moral obligation. If asked, whence the obligation to obey the civil magistrate who, personally, is but our fellow, we answer, from God's will, which is the source and measure of duty. Man's will is wayward and depraved. Hence practical authority to enforce this rule of right upon him must be lodged in some hands; and since God does not rule statedly by miracle, it must be in human hands. Civil government is God's ordinance, and its obligations are those of original moral right. The advantage and convenience resulting illustrate and confirm, but do not originate, the obligation. This is the theory of government plainly taught by St. Paul (Rom. xiii. 1 to 7) and St. Peter (1 Ep. ii. 13 to 18.) For we are here told that the civil magistrate is God's minister, to uphold right and repress wrong; that obedience to him in this is not only of moral, but religious obligation; and that he who resists this function disobeys God.

What, then, is man's natural liberty? We answer, that it is only privilege to do whatever he has a moral right to do. Freedom to do whatever a man wills, is not a liberty, either natural or civil, but an unnatural license, a natural iniquity; man's will being naturally depraved. What then is man's civil liberty? We reply, that under an equitable government, it is the same—the privilege to do whatever he has a moral right to do. No government is perfectly equitable: none are wholly unjust. Some withhold more, some fewer, of the citizen's moral rights. None withhold them all. Hence, under the most despotic government there are some rights left, and so, some liberty. A perfectly just government would be one which would allot to each citizen freedom to do all the things which he had a moral right to do, and nothing else. Such a government would not restrain the natural liberty of any citizen in any respect; each man's civil liberty would be identical with his natural. Government does not originate rights, neither can it justly take them away. But practically, it confirms, instead of impairing, our natural liberty; because it secures us in the exercise of it.

--Ibid.

How slavery fits into this picture he has painted Rev Dabney next explains:

Every government in the world acknowledges this necessity [compulsion/restraint/control--W.G.], and applies, in some form, this remedy. The abolition government of the United States, for instance, imposed compulsory restraints and labour upon multitudes of fugitive slaves, during the war. The only difference was, that whereas our system of domestic slavery placed this power in hands most powerfully interested to employ it humanely and wisely, the anti-slavery authorities placed it in hands which had every selfish inducement to abuse it to the misery of the slave, and the detriment of the publick interest. And the same government is to-day avouching every word of the above argument, by justifying itself, from a pretended political necessity, for placing the white race of the South under a much stricter bondage than that formerly borne by the negroes; a bondage which places not only labour and property, but life, at the irresponsible will of the masters. If slavery is wrong, then the abolitionists are the greatest sinners; for they have turned their own brethren into a nation of slaves.

Domestic servitude, as we define and defend it, is but civil government in one of its forms. All government is restraint; and this is but one form of restraint. As long as man is a sinner, and his will perverted, restraint is righteous. We are sick of that arrogant and profane cant, which asserts man's 'capacity for self-government' as a universal proposition; which represents human nature as so good, and democratic government as so potent, that it is a sort of miraculous panacea, sufficient to repair all the disorders of man's condition. All this ignores the great truths, that man is fallen; that his will is disordered, and therefore ought not to be his rule; that God, his owner and master, has ordained that he shall live under authority. What fruit has radical democracy ever borne, except factious oppression, anarchy, and the stern necessity for despotism?

--Ibid.

Slavery is, indeed, but one form of the institution, government. Government is controul. Some controul over all is necessary, righteous, and beneficent: the degree of it depends on the character of those to be controuled. As that character rises in the scale of true virtue, and self-command, the degree of outward controul may be properly made lighter. If the lack of those properties in any class is so great as to demand, for the good and safety of the whole, that extensive controul which amounts to slavery, then slavery is righteous, righteous by precisely the same reason that other government is righteous. And this is the Scriptural account of the origin of slavery, as justly incurred by the sin and depravity of man.

--From the section ‘Was Christ Afraid to Condemn Slavery?’, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm#Page_198

He then sums up the effects of the abolitionist view of man which he has been describing:

The promise was made above, to unmask some of the hideous affinities of the anti-slavery theory. This is now easy. If men are by nature sovereign and independent, and mechanically equal in rights, and if allegiance is founded solely on expressed or implied consent, then not only slavery, but every involuntary restraint imposed on a person or a class not convicted of crime, and every difference of franchise among the members of civil society, is a glaring wrong. Such are the premises of abolition. Obviously, then, the only just or free government is one where all franchises are absolutely equal to all sexes and conditions, where every office is directly elective, and where no magistrate has any power not expressly assented to by the popular will. For if inequalities of franchise may be justified by differences of character and condition, of course a still wider difference of these might justify so wide an inequality of rights as that between the master and servant. Your true abolitionist is then, of course, a Red-Republican, a Jacobin.

--From the section ‘Abolitionism is Jacobinism’, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm#Page_262

Things do not look so good for the Abolitionists at this point, and there are other reasons which Rev Dabney gives in his book that make their position look even worse:

--It was not the wicked South that engaged in the shipping of slaves from Africa.  That was under the control of Old England and ‘righteous’ New England, from which the latter profited enormously.  Furthermore, some Southerners bought slaves simply to save them from having to return to the brutal conditions of the English and Yankee trading ships.  See Ch. II, ‘The African Slave Trade’ for more:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm#Page_27

--Virginia, not Old England or any of the Yankee New England States, was the first nation to pass a law ending the slave trade on 5 Oct. 1778.  See Ch. 2 again.

--The population of the African slaves in the South grew robustly, much better than in New England, showing that they were treated very well overall by their masters in the Southern States.  See the section ‘Effects of Slavery on Population, Disease, and Crime’, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47422/47422-h/47422-h.htm#Page_340 .  This good treatment is also attested to by the fact that there was no general uprising of the slaves against their masters in the South during the War of Northern Aggression, though the North earnestly sought to stir up such dissension (the Emancipation Proclamation is just such a measure).  In general, the masters loved their slaves, and they in turn loved their masters.

But let us repeat here what Rev Dabney has already said:  The South does not say that slavery should be regarded as an ordinary part of human social and political life.  It is meant for extraordinary situations only and should be dispensed with when that situation no longer exists.  Such an one the Christian South believed herself to be in during the 17th century:  A large group of people from an alien land holding to heathen religious beliefs and practices suddenly found themselves living amongst her.  Some arrangement was necessary to keep good order between these two classes of men.  Southern slavery was the institution that developed to perform that function.  

However, as has been said many a time before, the era of slavery is over.  The Africans are no longer aliens amongst the Southern people.  That lasted but a short time; friendly relations began quite quickly, and the two then formed one culture:


Our African brothers and sisters are now an essential part of the fabric of the Christian South.  And truly, parts of African culture early on became integral parts of Southern life:  the banjo, folk tales, foodways, etc.  Today, Africans and Europeans still get along best in the South, the legacy of the pre-War era of friendship that had developed between the two.

Yet the South faltered somewhere, or else she would not have been decimated by the terrible War and its aftermath.  There are many sins one could point to:  shortcomings of the servants’ masters, the secularization of life, etc.  We should bewail them all and repent.  What we ought not to do is to act as though we have some special insight into God’s providence that tells us with absolute certainty why this calamity befell us.  Such insight is a gift reserved only for God’s holiest saints.  Those who lack that kind of unmistakable holiness yet make such pronouncements are proud and arrogant, full of hubris.  And yet we find that from the Abolitionist sect, whether from yesteryear or today, a rushing stream of such prophetic utterances comes gushing out.  The most well-known is probably Pres Lincoln’s from his Second Inaugural Address of 4 March 1865.  He said then,

"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."


The claim to this sort of mystical insight apart from holiness obtained by deep repentance and years of experience in the sacramental and liturgical life of the Orthodox Church is nothing other than the old Gnostic heresy reborn.  That unfortunately is an unmistakable part of Yankee American life.

Withal, we hope that it is now a little clearer that the South and her institution of slavery are the ones who are in line with Christian teaching regarding man and authority/government rather than those who hold to the Abolitionist dogma.  St John Chrysostom (+407), the Archbishop of Constantinople, died for speaking ‘truth to power’, for criticizing the lax morals of the Imperial Court in Constantinople, with the Empress Eudoxia becoming an especially bitter enemy.  If any in the Church had courage enough to denounce slavery as inherently sinful, if that were its true nature, he would have been that man.  What, then, did he say when he preached about it? 

Ver. 23. "Ye were bought with a price: become not bondservants of men." This saying is addressed not to slaves only but also to free men. For it is possible for one who is a slave not to be a slave; and for one who is a freeman to be a slave. "And how can one be a slave and not a slave?" When he doeth all for God: when he feigns nothing, and doeth nothing out of eye-service towards men: that is how one that l is a slave to men can be free. Or again, how doth one that is free become a slave? When he serves men in any evil service, either for gluttony or desire of wealth or for office' sake. For such an one, though he be free, is more of a slave than any man.

And consider both these points. Joseph was a slave but not a slave to men: wherefore even in slavery he was freer than all that are free. For instance, he yielded not to his mistress; yielded not to the purposes which she who possessed him desired. Again she was free; yet none ever so like a slave, courting and beseeching her own servant. But she prevailed not on him, who was free, to do what he would not. This then was not slavery; but it was liberty of the most exalted kind. For what impediment to virtue had he from his slavery? Let men hear, both slaves and free. Which was the slave? He that was entreated or she that did entreat? She that besought or he that despised her supplication?

In fact, there are limits set to slaves by God Himself; and up to what point one ought to keep them, has also been determined, and to transgress them is wrong. namely, when your master commands nothing which is unpleasing to God, it is right to follow and to obey; but no farther. For thus the slave becomes free. But if you go further, even though you are free you are become a slave. At least he intimates this, saying, "Be not ye the servants of men."

But if this be not the meaning, if he bade them forsake their masters and strive contentiously to become free, in what sense did he exhort them, saying, "Let each one remain in the calling in which he is called?" And in another place, (1 Timothy chapter 6, verse 1 and 1 Timothy chapter 6, verse 2) "As many servants as are under the yoke, let them count their own masters worthy of all honor; and those that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren who partake of the benefit." And writing to the Ephesians also and to the Colossians, he ordains and exacts the same rules. Whence it is plain that it is not this slavery which he annuls, but that which caused as it is by vice befalls free men also: and this is the worst kind of slavery, though he be a free man who is in bondage to it. For what profit had Joseph's brethren of their freedom? Were they not more servile than all slaves; both speaking lies to their father, and to the merchants using false pretences, as well as to their brother? But not such was the free man: rather every where and in all things he was true. And nothing had power to enslave him, neither chain nor bondage nor the love of his mistress nor his being in a strange land. But he abode free every where. For this is liberty in the truest sense when even in bondage it shines through.

--Homily XIX on I Corinthians, section 5, commentary on I Cor. 7, bolding added, http://www.ecmarsh.com/fathers/npnf1/NPNF1-12/npnf1-12-24.htm#P888_526242.

We will happily make a stand next to men like St John and Rev Dabney rather than the atheistic doctrines of the Abolitionists.  The choice between the two still has great relevance:

If we want to understand the culture wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we must come to grips with the culture wars of the nineteenth century.  In order to do this, it is necessary to get clear on the nature of American slavery, which was not what its abolitionist opponents claimed for it.

--Douglas Wilson, Black & Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America, Moscow, Idaho, Canon Press, 2005, p. 4.

Said another way, the Abolitionists were the social justice warriors of the mid-19th century, violent and un-Christian, though they paraded about in Christian garb.  Antifa has simply shed the phony Christian mask of its Abolitionist forebears.  Thus, both the modern Abolitionists (the true believers in Yankee Americanism) and the SJWs are sprung from the same root.  But now, ironically, these brothers are heading for their own fratricidal war.  And yet Southern history and tradition, like a voice in the wilderness, calls all of them back from the abyss, to a better understanding of man and society.  Will they give heed to the voice of that people this time, or simply beat them senseless as a previous generation did to silence the words that sting their consciences?

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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