This speech called the “Cornerstone Speech” by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens was referenced in another SDMB post, and I went looking for it. It’s really quite a remarkable speech, and sort of summarizes the reasons the South was going to war. It’s all the more remarkable to me in that I always kind of assumed that (on some level) the people of the South simply didn’t know any better regarding how horrendous slavery was, as it was simply part of the cultural landscape they were raised and immersed in.
The Cornerstone speech was quite an eye opener on that point. It makes clear that slavery was not simply some hidebound folkway, but a very specific and parsed moral calculus that the supporters were making, and that they were exquisitely well aware of how the rest of the nation felt about their “peculiar institution” and the moral arguments it.
Always interesting to read something from a time and place with values in opposition to those we take for granted. Like a speech by Himmler I read somewhere–the leadership, at least, knew exactly what they were doing and defended their position as the correct one. Horrific, but interesting.
Missed edit window–what I mean is that we all have a tendency to ascribe different viewpoints to “ignorance”, when they clash with our own (could I say) apex values. Seeing such viewpoints rationally defended can be a weird experience.
“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”
I can’t wait to pull this out the next time I hear some asshole talk about the War of Northern Aggression and State’s Rights.
The South had dug in its heels on slavery some time before that, beginning really with an 1837 speech by John C. Calhoun asserting that slavery was not only not immoral, but was a positive good. That speech, more than any other event, in my opinion, set the nation on the path to war. Before that speech, many Southern politicians had expressed regret about slavery and hope that it could somehow be ended. Before that speech, it was still possible to think about moving the South toward gradual abolition and seeking some sort of national reconciliation. After that speech, other Southern politicians (their pride stung by abolitionist moralizing from the North) followed Calhoun’s lead and began to harden their positions. The battle lines were drawn.
Calhoun is one of the biggest bastards our nation has produced.
As for Stephens, he was (interestingly) a strong opponent of secession before it became a fait accompli.
Give them their due as human beings, though - the abolitionist sentiment had been growing for some decades even prior to Calhoun’s speech. The South had been the target of an ever-louder campaign denouncing them as immoral, cruel, savage, etc. for engaging in something that their denouncers had given up themselves only very recently. Being attacked on moral grounds naturally causes one to look for defenses on moral grounds, and that’s what we see there.
I’ve always thought the “states’ rights” argument in later generations, and today, is based upon its exponents not only being unwilling to call their own ancestors immoral, but on their often sharing those racist attitudes themselves. That movement too gained strength only recently, and in the same kind of dynamic - their practice of segregation, a fallback from slavery, was being widely denounced as immoral etc., so a moral defense had to be found.
But you’re right that to claim the Civil War was primarily motivated by anything other than slavery and its abolition is simply nonfactual.
With the caveat that a distinction should be drawn between the motivations of the governments of the Confederacy and the motivations of individual soldiers. Fair to say that most Confederate soldiers joined up because their nation, as they saw it, was threatened with invasion. Or they were drafted.
True dat, with another caveat that slavery was by then the central identifying part of the nation they were fighting for, even the many of them who were too poor to own any themselves. Many, too, as always, joined up just to get jobs. Motives are always complicated when you get into them, aren’t they?
There were also Southern regiments in the *Union * Army, from every Confederate state but 1 (Georgia?), and plenty of border-staters and free-staters who joined the rebels. Some no doubt believed in slavery, some in abolition, some in Union, some in states’ rights, some in combinations that confused the hell out of anyone looking to pick a side, some undecided, some in none of the above.
The Cornerstone speech did the Confederacy no favors. It said things that were better left unsaid. The Confederacy hoped to gain European recognition, and advertising itself as a monument to slavery didn’t help.
But then, what would one expect from a Vice President? I’ve always found it amusing that the Confederates, with 71 years of experience under the Union Constitution, didn’t shit-can some its more useless features like the Vice Presidency.
At least they gave their President a line-item veto, and limited him to a single term!
The Cornerstone Speech is the clearest explication of the official Confederate mindset I’ve ever read (although Jefferson Davis’s condemnation of the Emancipation Proclamation as “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man” is also instructive). Slavery, and the Southern desire to protect and extend it, was the necessary but not sufficient precondition of the Civil War. “States’ rights” was little more than window dressing.
Who else do you consider being in the running? Even Andrew Jackson isn’t as smarmy, I don’t think.
ETA:
Actually, yes, it is. It’s rational defense from irrational premises, but still rational, once you accept the premises upon which it is founded.
ETATA: It’s worth noting that the assumption of superiority of the White Race over The Negro was often a source of commonality between Abolitionists and slaveholders. Not all, of course. But many Abolitionists objected to the owning of slaves less out of some sense of equality or brotherhood with the slaves, than out of a moral repugnance for the idea of owning even the lowest human being.
If the premise is irrational then the defense is too.
Anyway, it was well settled by this time that all human beings were of the same species, and so on. The slaveowners (or abolitionists who considered nonwhites a lesser being) didn’t assign value judgments to varieties of any other animal (beyond “this is good to eat and this is not”)- greyhounds were not seen as intrinsically superior to, say, mastiffs- so the belief that the white man was intrinsically superior to the black man was a convenient way to defend one’s right to own them.
And you’re a lawyer? Are you allowed to say things like that?
More seriously, I was taking it to be a description of the arguments being used - which were following rationally from flawed premises. Rather than going off in irrational segues that had little to do with the premise before them. For an example of the first: The arguments about a celestial ether made sense at the time, and followed rationally from the premises of the people making those arguments. It took the interferometer experiment to disprove the premises, not an attack on the logic of the arguments. At the other end of the scale, consider your average Conspiracy Theorist, whose premises may or may not be insane, but whose arguments often are, drawing conclusions from evidence that are insupportable to most who actually look at their evidence.
sigh Species and Race were not the same thing in the minds of most educated people of that time. I’m not trying to defend their premises - I think they’re bunk. But to argue, now, that they couldn’t have held the views they are recorded as having, because they know the difference between species and breeds in other animals is hugely contra-historical.
For pity’s sake, when I took mammalogy back in the 80’s ISTR we were taught a taxonomic schema that had pongids and hominids as separate families. And even then, my professor was saying that there were other schema that had more sense to them, lumping all the great apes, chimps and humans together - but the one he was teaching was the least controversial schema in use at the time. Even today, Wikipedia’s official taxonomy of the subfamily homindae has the chimps and humans in seperate genera, when we’re more closely related to chimps than, say, jackals are to wolves.
I’m not trying to argue the merits of specific taxonomic schema, really - just using the still-ongoing and sometimes controversial position of humans in such to illustrate that even today people often react emotionally when considering how humans fit into the natural world. I don’t find your argument compelling that our ancestors should have known that Race was bunk, and that arguments based upon that foundation were without merit, because they knew that all of them were human. Race was seen as hugely important. You can claim it was a rationalization made to allow them justify slave holding to themselves. But whether it was convenient to believe in the concept or Race as some kind of biological reality doesn’t address whether the people who used such terms believed in them or not.
Your position here seems to be that it was a sham, something they sold first to themselves, knowing it was false, then tried to sell to the rest of the world, like a con artist. I disagree with that view. However illogical, and indefensible in terms of what we understand of biology, now, and however much it was predicated upon the idea that humanity was apart from the rest of nature, not a part of it, I still contend that many people of that era believed to their cores that Race was a valid and important concept.
(keeps from Godwinizing himself, but just barely)
I think I’ll let this stand before I begin to froth at the mouth.
Regardless of whether “Race” is a valid concept, there is (and was) no evidence for the superiority of one race over another.
If you think the “we’re better than them” justification isn’t merely a fabrication - I will agree that people genuinely believed it, but not that the people behind it, such as Calhoun and his ilk, did - let’s try a quick thought experiment.
Let’s pretend Japan conquered an empire closely paralleling the (real) British Empire, including large swathes of Europe and most of North America. Japanese colonists in the (future) United States own millions of white European slaves, imported to work the plantations.
What, do you suppose, are the odds that white people are bandying around theories for their clear racial supremacy under that scenario?
The racialists of the day knew very well that all sorts of ethnic groups had been preeminent at one time or another. They would certainly have learned about how the Arab conquest of Europe ended at the gates of Vienna, for example.
The only evidence was the lack of “civilization” in Africa, as the Europeans defined civilization. Anything historical was used to support the idea that contemporaneous Africans were degenerate examples of once-proud peoples. And, of course, the same was said of those tribes without such history. Who were considered even lower for not have had a past glory to degenerate from.
In what way is this appreciably different from what the Japanese were doing between their Manchurian conquests, and the subjugation of European colonies in the Pacific during WWII? It has and does happen that one culture or group will claim that they are the only true humans, or that their opponents are sub-human.
Isn’t that part of the problem in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians: both sides have allowed the rhetoric to build so that there are huge segments of both populations that deny the very humanity of their opponents.
Again, I’m not trying to defend Race. Especially not the idea of any kind of Racial superiority. I simply meant to disagree with your assertion that Race was a scam to justify slave holding. It was a mistake, a grievous crime and completely unsupportable by any science today.
That still doesn’t mean that people like Calhoun had to be charlatans as well as being scum. I am not an expert on Calhoun, by any means, but I suspect he’d have been less devastating had he been a charlatan, rather than an advocate for a position he fully believed.
Yes. But, the racialists of the day also made a huge distinction between their African slaves, and their aboriginal populations on the one hand and the Arabs, or the Chinese, or Indians, or Japanese on the other. Not all non-Europeans were equal, after all.
I wouldn’t want to infect you with patience for it. It’s one thing to understand what those people were thinking: don’t mistake that with sympathizing with their positions. As I said, it’s a vile, hateful lie, and I am disgusted that I could find examples of that thinking all over the web if I were to care to search.
It may be a comfort for some to point out that the majority views have changed to something more rational. I tend to be a ‘glass half-empty’ sort, and tend to focus on how the lie of Race and racialist supremacy is still with us.
It’s just my opinion that the student of history does themselves no favors, and interferes with their ability to understand historical actions, when the student ignores that people in the past have believed with frightening, and horrifying, sincerity things that look absolutely insane to most of us, today.
People are damn good at cherry-picking evidence for things they want to believe, and ignoring evidence that shows that their cherished belief might be wrong. The people who can and do set aside a deeply held belief because there’s evidence to the contrary are few and far between. You can see evidence that people do this just about anywhere you look.
