Editor’s Note: In this series of articles, we continue our exploration of what the Confederates really believed and thought about race by looking at the South’s most important intellectual journals. We don’t find much support for the Rainbow Confederacy.
This is an excerpt from WM H. Holcombe’s excellent article “The Alternative, A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South” that appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in February 1861:
“In opposition to the prevailing sentiment of the North, we believe that men are created neither free or equal. They are born unequal in physical and mental endowments, and no possible circumstances or culture could ever raise the negro to any genuine equality with the white. Man is born dependent, and the very first step in civilization was for one man to enslave another. A state of slavery has been a disciplinary ordeal to every people who have ever developed beyond the savage condition. Those who cannot be reduced to bondage, like the American Indian, perish in their isolated and defiant barbarism. Freedom is the last result, the crowning glory of the long and difficult evolution of human society. Few nations have yet attained to that lofty standard. Those who say that the French, the Italians or the Prussians, are still not yet fit for freedom, and are still unable to appreciate of constitutional liberty, would thrust the splendid privilege of the Anglo-Saxon superiority upon the semi-barbarous negro! What folly, what madness!
Man has no “inalienable rights” – not even those of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If the life he leads, the liberty he enjoys, and the happiness he pursues, are not consistent with the order and well-being of society, he may righteously be deprived of them all. Instead of that “glittering generality,” which might serve as a motto for the wildest anarchy, the truth is, that men and races of men have certain natural capacities and duties, and the right to use the one and discharge the other. That government is the best, and its people the happiest, not in which all are free and equal, but in which equal races are free, and the inferior race is wisely and humanely subordinated to the superior, whilst both are controlled by the sacred bonds of reciprocal duty.
The negro is a permanent variety of the human race, inferior to almost all others in intellect, but possessing an emotional nature capable of the most beautiful cultivation. The greater part of this race, in its native Africa, is sunk in the deepest barbarism. What little civilization a few tribes might have, has been imposed upon them by Arabic and Moorish conquerers …
The Southern view of the matter, destined to revolutionize opinion throughout the civilized world, is briefly this: African slavery is no retrograde movement, no discord in the harmony of nature, no violation of elemental justice, no infraction of immutable laws, human or divine – but an integral link in the grand progressive evolution of human society as an indissoluble whole …
America’s epitaph:
“It may yet deserve (the North’s “free society”) the strange epitaph written for this nation by Elwood Fisher:
“Here lies a people, who, in attempting to liberate the negro, lost their own freedom.”
Have we rightly comprehended the fearful import of those words, the Africanization of the South? According to the present rate of increase, in fifty years the negroes of these states will amount to fifty millions. Suppose them to be restricted to their present arena. Suppose them, in addition, to be free. Imagine the misery, the poverty, the crime, the barbarism, the desolation of the country! The grass would grow in the streets of our cities, our ships would rot in their harbors, our plantations would become a wilderness of canebrakes. The resubjugation of the negro, or the extermination of one race or the other would be inevitable, and in any chance our children would be beggared with an inheritance of woe. Let us swear upon the altar of God, that as Christians and citizens, we will resist to the death which might lead us toward this awful abyss!“
Hell, I was expecting to consult the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger and find proof of the existence of “Black Confederates” and the Rainbow Confederacy. What a disappointment!
Here’s another excerpt about the origins of Southern conservatism from “Southern Civilization, or the Norman in America”:
“This deeply rooted attachment of the Southern colonies to the institutions of the British monarchy, had its origins in the native reverence of the Cavalier for the authority of established forms over mere speculative ideas; and this original sentiment was greatly strengthened and supported by the existence of a domestic institution, all of whose relations had their foundation in a social condition, resting on the principle of inequality and subordination, and favoring a public policy embodying the ideas of this social status.”
BOOM!
The legacy of slavery is why the South is authoritarian and conservative.
In the Confederacy’s war propaganda, which Rainbow Confederates are strangely silent about, we hear about “the principle of inequality and subordination,” “inorganic masses,” “a public policy embodying the ideas of social status,” the superiority of “system of polity” over the individual, the rejection of the idea that “all men are created equal,” the superiority of “established forms” over “mere speculative ideas,” attacks on “fanatics” and “system-builders,” “the negro is a permanent variety of the human race,” etc.
Why do you think Northern classical liberals like George Will and David French have embraced the term “conservatism” to describe their views? There is nothing “conservative” about their views. Their ideology actually conserves nothing and is destructive to traditional cultures. The answer is to confuse our people and dupe them into supporting their little Jewish racket because the more accurate label “liberalism” is so wildly unpopular. David French admitted this in his podcast with Charlie Sykes on The Bulwark.
Told you so
Good stuff, man! You (facetiously) wrote:
Ha! You’re more likely to find those proofs in the Southern Quarterly Review than in The Messenger, but not likely to find them there either. lol.
I don’t know why but I was actually (pleasantly) surprised to see you cite that article from The Messenger, which I’ve read at least a couple of times in the past. Among many others from the same publication. In fact, I have listed many of the articles of especial interest to me in that and other Old South publications under their appropriate categories such as “Education,” “The Yankee Mind and Character,” all of the articles related to “Our Navy,” and so on. I started doing so a couple of years ago to facilitate my finding them again for future reference. In any case, I’m sure you already know that R.L. Dabney wrote a lot about the slavery issue as well, both in his book A Defense of Virginia and the South as well as in numerous essays and articles taking Dr. Chalmers and others to task. I read in the comments to one of your earlier articles in the series down thread where one of the commenters accused a reader of not having read much, then going on to blather on about how the slaves made Southern plantation owners rich, enhanced the culture and blah blah. Typical Yankee balderdash passed off as good “history.” If your Yankee-inspired commenter has read much at all himself, he certainly hasn’t read “the rest of the story,” I can guarantee him that.
“The grass would grow in the streets of our cities,”
He’s obviously never seen Niggertown, with its grass trampled to death, in yards that turn into a loblolly whenever it rains.
Ha, ha! Yeah, I liked that one, as well as the one about there being millions of “Southern Whites” who have more than a drop of African blood streaming through their veins. Tens of millions would have worked better since we’re aiming for effect.
He might actually be close to right about the number of mullatos currently living in the South in any case, but they’re by and large not the products of black slaves breeding with Southern whites. We know e.g. from true history that the Yankee invader fully expected to find many such mixed people in the South, given over as he was to believe the nonsense propagated by Yankee school marms in their Yellow-back novels, but instead was shocked to find this in fact was virtually non-existent. We also know that many a Yankee foot soldier in the occupation forces had sexual trysts with the female freedmen during the Reconstruction era, and that lots of Yankee Carpet-baggers who came in chasing the almighty dollar found these woolley headed females to be willing and easy prey as well.
It of course goes without saying that the products of these sexual trysts do not equate to “Southern Whites with more than a drop of African blood running through their veins.”
Oh, I also meant to mention that anyone who’s actually “read much” on the subject knows that if slave labor made anyone rich, it was the Yankee manufactures by way of the protective tarriff imposed on Southern exports. Which history teaches us made sense at the beginning, but also tells us that Yankee greed got the best of him at the end of the day. Meanwhile it is common knowledge within well read circles that the Yankee invader and his “bummers” looted and stole what remaining wealth was left in the South, including that possessed by certain blacks, just before he burned everything down and left her towns in ruins. …
“Here lies a people, who, in attempting to liberate the negro, lost their own freedom.”
Now that is succinct. Pithy. Laconic. Straight to the point.
“Man has no “inalienable rights” – not even those of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.””
I respond:
Unfortunately that horrible, worst ever America was founded in liberty and universal human equality, that terrible speech was penned not by some idiot North easterner; it was written by the Virginian Thomas Jefferson. The BlackLiesMatter, Antifa, LGBT near takeover of Thomas Jefferson’s home town and his university the University of Virginia Charlottesville – this is a sad case of the leading Southerner Thomas Jefferson’s terrible words coming back to haunt hims/us.
In Jefferson’s lifetime, Virginia became more authoritarian and conservative and even more so after his death in the antebellum era. The same was true of the South in general. There is nothing about the Declaration of Independence itself that leads to that interpretation of it. It was well understood in the South at the time that Jefferson was only criticizing monarchy and aristocracy in that passage and was calling for a republican government like the one Virginia established after the Revolution.
Your excerpts fails to note the patronage of the Jew, in terms of Negro emancipation. FYI – the South is just as jewed and back stabbing and Negro worshipping as any other place. More so, in many ways.
Jews had little to do with abolitionism.
The jews in America at that time were primarily interested in mercantilism, but that’s only because they were not yet numerous nor well established enough to practice more advanced forms of kikery. You must admit that Madam is correct in her assessment of the average Southron’s lack of awareness regarding Der Judenfrage, HW.
Spahn – you can say anything and I mean ANY derogatory thing to Southern Whites about Negroes, for the most part – but most go PSYCHO CHIMP OUT Grand Mal Deluxe DERANGED if you utter a whisper of criticism about the true God of the Southern Evangelitards – Der ewige Self Chosen.
Denise,
This is absolutely true. I have noticed that as well. Condemn blacks for their actions and they warm up to you but mention even the slightest truthful condemnation of Jews and they get angry fast. This is more noticeable among protestant fundamentalists like Baptist types.
Hunter – I did not write “abolition”. I wrote “emancipation”. Jews ran the slave trade, out of Rhode Island in the North, and South Carolina, in the South. Charleston is still a very important Jew HQ. You know that Jews are all over Yankeeland – Boston and NY. Please don’t forget about the myriad of Cryptos. You know that the Civil War had NOTHING to do with freeing the Negroes. It was all about protecting the Rothschild cotton profits, and, in an over arching context, taking over control of the United States, by systematically bifurcating The States. Divide and conquer – which is what they have done.
Northern Whites had precious little interactions with day in day out Negrotude, unless Southerners. And for that matter STILL DON’T. I find your information about Yankeeland, especially the New England Puritan whackoes (Calvin was a Chosen!) to be especially informative and amusing. I always learn new things, in all of your historical posts. So thank you.
The thing is – STILL, to THIS minute – a vast majority of Northern Whites have no day in day out experience with Negroes, or members of other Races – outside of major cities.This is changing, but Negroes have always been more of an ideological cause celebre, the chief maguffin of Virtue Signalling, than a flesh and blood reality. It’s a cliché that White espouse egalitarian “ideals” – but where do they LIVE?
Average every day ordinary Whites, up in the Despise-ed Yankeeland, have never wanted to live next door to Negroes. Jews have used Negroes, in North and South America, for their purposes, since the beginning. First as slaves, and now as bio weapons against Whites. After the end of the Jew Cotton War – Jews were force behind “racial equality”. Write about their support and promotion of W.E.B. Dubois. There’s a fascinating case study. He was born in MA (where-in the Negro population was statistically insignificant. It’s easy to regard Negroes as “just like us” when there are so FEW of them. He was also a mulatto) – but his status as a Nation Wrecking avatar ranged the whole of the land. As far as his (((backers))) – he was the Barry Sotoero of his day.
Denise,
Once again you speak the truth. I have asked white Americans if they believe in integration. They all say yes, then I ask if they would live in a black neighborhood. So far they have all said NO.
Denise, you wrote:
It’s not my place to decide or declare what the purpose of these musings of Mr. Wallace’s are, since I am of course not him. But I will say that as for me and the purpose of my personal musings on the subject, it is and always has been to come to the knowledge of the truth, as far as I am able to discern it. That said, your “FYI,” be all of it as it may in our day and time, nevertheless fails to account for the history of how we got to where we are now. In other words, from whence did all of this originate? I answer that it originated in the Yankee/Northern/Union states, and that the Confederates were perfectly right in attempting to prevent its overtaking the South. What you are describing is an after-effect of the “Lost Cause.” An after-effect, bty, that our glorious forbears did their damndest to prevent. As far as the JQ goes, I understand what he is saying, but agree more with you on the actual influence of Jew-ism on the evolution of Abolitionism in the North.
T. Morris – the source of our destruction starts with George Washington. The Rhode Island Jews threw him a big party, after we booted England, and flattered him, and he let them stay. He murdered the American Newborn in the cradle.
FYI – I fully support the tragic attempt of Dixie to secede. I have educated every-one I know on this point. (((The Media))) treats the vile Lincoln as a Hero – but I have been vociferous in my denunciation of that MONSTER. People are beginning to get it….
Oh yeah, just look at how the Southrons worship their nigger football. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if you took their niggerball.games away.
That editorial cartoon at the top of the page depicting flamboyantly attired Negroes engaging in clownish behavior on the floor of the legislature is as relevant now as it was during Reconstruction.