A controversy errupted in Michigan a few weeks ago over students wearing Confederate flag clothing to school. Support for the students that wore the gear was considerable, and a poll from the local news agency that ran the story reveals that 71 percent don’t think wearing Confederate flag items to school is a big deal. Still, confusion arose over such issues as whether the Civil War was fought over slavery and whether our country was founded on equality. An expert on each side of the debate weighed in here.
Well, at least one expert.
The other person was a SCV camp commander, which means a softy that is hardly an expert at his own mission of “preserving the history and legacy of [CSA] heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.”
Leonard Grummel said, “This was a states’ rights issue and not a slavery issue as has been taught. The problem is that the winner or the victor, gets to write the history books. The North won. They wrote the history books.”
He is correct that the history books are written by the victors. We love how John Chodes put it : “[N]o conquered people ever wrote the accepted history of the conquest.” But is it true that the war was not a slavery issue?
Monica Tetzlaff, a history professor at IUSB, claims that it was:
The Civil War was fought for many reasons. I won’t claim that [slavery] was the only one. However, for African Americans, they knew that this war was bringing them freedom. Certainly, the Confederacy did not stand for freedom for African Americans.
She cites the secession documents from South Carolina- the first state to secede from the Union. In the documents, South Carolina refers to itself as a “slave-holding state” and the Northern states are “non-slave holding states.”
“When you do start to look at the documents, not the propaganda, you see that slavery was pretty important to those founders of the Confederacy,” said Tetzlaff.
She is right, and below is some history, written by the captives (not the captors), for Grummel to consider.
The end of the South Carolina declaration reads:
On the 4th day of March next, this [Republican] party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory [i.e., no slavery in the territories], that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
Such read the secession documents of other states, too: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Texas. All five discuss slavery as the primary reason for secession, and some states discuss no other reason—not the tariff, nor even the 10th Amendment.
In January of 1861, Mississippi adopted their document, “Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” which reads:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
Here is the Declaration’s crisp summation of the history of abolition:
“It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.”
Does the SCV commander have any comments on this?
*crickets chirping*
Excerpts from Georgia’s Constitution:
… For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.
…The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen….
…These are sound and just principles which have received the approbation of just men in all countries and all centuries; but they are wholly disregarded by the people of the Northern States, and the Federal Government is impotent to maintain them. For twenty years past the abolitionists and their allies in the Northern States have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions and to excite insurrection and servile war among us. They have sent emissaries among us for the accomplishment of these purposes. Some of these efforts have received the public sanction of a majority of the leading men of the Republican party in the national councils, the same men who are now proposed as our rulers. These efforts have in one instance led to the actual invasion of one of the slave-holding States, and those of the murderers and incendiaries who escaped public justice by flight have found fraternal protection among our Northern confederates.
When Texas laid out her reasons for succession, she wrote:
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
With Mr. Grummel, we affirm that these sovereign states believed the choice was theirs to stay or to leave. But unlike Grummel’s stance, ours mustn’t erroneously isolate State’s rights, but recognize it properly as the formal issue for secession. We must also acknowledge that formal issues always materialize themselves, and the material issue of this war was patently slavery.
Now let’s back up to South Carolina’s secession document. Did you catch that little bit about “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist”? This broaches the question of whether our nation was founded on the type of equality that would preclude slavery. Here we remind readers that slavery, far from being a Southern thing, existed when the US Constitution was ratified. That is, all men who signed the document did so with full cognizance of evil-wicked-Nazi-hateful-oppressive slavery. Whatever the referent of ‘equality’ in the Constitution, it could’nt have been political equality between blacks and whites.
But what did the average American think about the social status of the Negro? For starters, the great Emancipator himself said:
I am not now, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races. I am not now nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarriages with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality. There must be a position of superior and inferior, and I am in favor of assigning the superior position to the white man.
The one heralded for freeing the black man didn’t believe the black man to be equal to the white man? Yes, that’s quite odd – but he was a damn Yankee! The South alone held the truth.
Really?
Responding to the idea that slavery would pass away, CSA Vice President Stephens said:
Our new [CSA] 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.
In other words, CSA leaders believed their “racist” view of the negro and slavery was that of America’s founders’ and that it was secured by the Constitution.
And Stephens’ view wasn’t different from that of his Commander in Chief:
In moral and social condition [negroes] had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people… -Jefferson Davis
That’s what we call a 10 foot gorilla in the lobby of the SCV headquarters.
To conclude, let’s back up one more time to call out a curious, passing reference from Georgia’s Constitution:
While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all…
What’s that? Conceded by all? If our nation was built on “equality,” how could all of its founders have believed in the contrary? Or how could Confederates have casually made such false statements which could have easily been exposed by the 19th century Civil Rights lobby?
It’s because the statements are true and the only men that need pantsed are egalitarian SCV camp commanders.
Like all of our Christian ancestors, our nation’s founders and our Confederate fathers were ethnonationalits who understood that race is a substantial aspect to individual and group identity. They believed that left to his own resources, the Negro was a cannibalistic savage prone to Voodoo worship. And since if the Negro could only live among the white if he were under the latter’s utter rule, he must be a slave. For such truths the Confederate Veteran spilled his blood.
And for such truths, the Sons of Confederate Veterans spew lies.