Southern History Series: Confederate Racial Ideology

Editor’s Note: In this article, we continue our exploration of what the Confederates really believed about race. We don’t find anything resembling the Baby Boomer Rainbow Confederacy either.

The following excerpt is from Henry Washington’s article The Races of Men which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in April 1860:

“I now come to my second proposition, that there is, and always has been, not merely diversity but inequality among the races of men – that they are differently endowed by nature – that to each a part has been assigned, and that on each faculties have been bestowed adapted to the part assigned. So simple seems this theory, so comfortable to fact, to history and to experience, that any discussion of it here would be out of place, that we did not know that a vague and undefined idea of human equality is, perhaps, of all others, the most prevalent, and the most deeply rooted in the public mind of the age.”

In 1860, Southerners are already reacting to Yankee egalitarianism which is based on misrepresenting the Declaration of Independence:

“We meet it everywhere, in all ranks and classes. Tacitly, and almost unconsciously, it is made the basis of our Constitution and our social systems. It has found its way into the Virginia Bill of Rights. It stands in the very front of the Declaration of Independence. It is there announced as a self evident truth that all men are by nature equal. Indeed, the idea of human equality is the source of many of the most mischievous errors of our times. No one call tell how much false philosophy, false legislation, and false philanthropy have been based upon it.”

The Declaration of Independence is based on the false assumption of human equality. The Confederacy was based on the proposition that all men are not created equal and that some races and social classes are superior to others and should rule in a “Patrician Republic.”

The following excerpt comes from William Holcombe’s article Characteristics and Capabilities of the Negro Race which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond in December 1861:

The article begins with a blunt statement of Confederate racial ideology:

“The negro is not a white man with black skin, but, if not a distinct species, at least a permanent variety of the human race. He has physical, ethnological, and psychological peculiarities which differentiate him from all other races of men; and it is by these, and not by a priori theories of any kind, that his moral, social, and political status is to be determined.”

This is a crucial distinction:

– The Southern view of race was derived from empiricism. It was based on observation and experience in dealing with blacks over the course of several generations. The traditional status of the blacks in Southern society was a practical and organic response to their observed racial peculiarities.

– The Northern view of blacks was an a priori rationalist deduction from the premise that “all men are created equal.” They knew what blacks were really like from a safe distance.

“The brain and nervous system of the negro is smaller and more coarsely organized than in the other varieties of man. The brain substance is, on an average, nine cubic inches less in bulk than that of a Caucasian. Negroes with very large, fine heads, may still have very small brains, because the actual capacity of the cranium is encroached upon the extreme thickness of the bones. The organs of sense are acute, especially those of hearing and smell – the conformation of the latter approaching the animal type.”

There are physical differences between the races in brain size and brain structure. There are also differences in the senses like eyesight, hearing, and smell.

“He seems to delight in the sun. I have often seen them eating their dinners on the Louisiana plantations, sitting bare headed in the blaze of noon, when large rainsheds or fine umbrageous trees were close at hand. This capacity of enduring great heat qualifies him for labor amid the dense foliage of the cotton plant and sugar cane in a hot latitude, where such work would infallibly destroy a white man.”

Blacks are biologically adapted to tropical and semi-tropical environments. The White race is adapted to more temperate latitudes. The Deep South has a semi-tropical environment which makes Whites unsuitable as a laboring class on rice, cotton and sugarcane plantations.

“The black skin of the negro exhales, especially when heated, a very offensive perspiration. Negroes seldom have bad breath, but excrete much of the fetid and carbonaceous matter of the body by and through the skin, which is consequently very oil. The black skin by no means constitutes a man a negro … The black skin is a very small part of that tout ensemble of physical and mental inferiority which necessitates the subordination of the negro to the white man.”

There are important physiological differences in the skin which is the largest organ in the human body. The difference in skin color alone though doesn’t make a man a negro. It is just one of many racial differences like average brain size.

“These physical peculiarities, which, I hope, have not proved too tedious for my reader, are of vast importance in forming a just scientific estimate of the present condition and probable future of the African race. They prove the hopeless physical and mental inferiority of that race to the Caucasian type; they prove the negro to be organically constituted – to be an agricultural laborer in tropical climates – a strong animal machine, admirably adapted to subjugate the torrid zone to the culture and interests of the civilized world, under the supervision and by the impulsion of a superior type of man. Nor do they give any special promise of higher destiny till other causes shall be brought to bear upon him than those of which have been in operation for the last six thousand years.”

The negro is perfectly suited to be an agricultural laborer in tropical and semi-tropical environments. Under the guidance of a superior race, the potential of the negro can be harnessed to spread civilization through the tropical regions of the world.

“Feebleness of will and childish inferiority of intellect, combined with strong animal propensities, are the keys to the psychological inferiority of the African race. Together with mental incapacity, there is a strange torpor of the volitional principle which has hitherto limited the negro to the barbaric phases of life. He is organically averse to labour – at least, to anything like regular and continued toil. Although distinguished by gross animal propensities, his will is too weak to command his muscles to work for their gratification. The “dignity of labor” is an idea which has never yet entered the brain of the African. His conception of liberty, in the great majority of cases, does not transcend the idea of freedom from work.”

This is reflected in the “counter-plantation system” and the collapse of civilization in Haiti following independence in 1804. In Haiti, the artificially imposed norms of European civilization were destroyed root and branch by a predominantly African born slave population, whereas emancipation was much more limited in Dixie, Brazil and the British West Indies.

“Laziness is therefore a prime feature in negro character, and lies at the bottom of necessity for slavery. If negroes would work as spiritedly and progress as rapidly as free white laborers, emancipation would not only be possible and proper, but inevitable. Negroes may be trained to systematic toil, but they will generally abandon it when the impulsive power is withdrawn.”

In both Haiti during the American occupation and Congo under Belgian administration, the usual features of Western civilization like roads, bridges, canals, schools, hospitals and so forth were rapidly introduced through corvée labor, and just as rapidly disappeared following the end of coercion.

“No spoiled white child is more capricious, silly, lazy, conceited, impertinent, ungrateful, or ungovernable than a negro spoiled by injudicious kindness and laxity of discipline. The management of negroes and the management of children should be based upon the same principle, and should be conducted by the same wise combination of unflinching firmness and tender humanity.”

As we move further away from the antebellum and Jim Crow South, the negro has grown more aggrieved, more conceited, more demanding, and more ungrateful than he ever was under slavery and segregation. In fact, the more that negroes are treated like children by White people the more inclined they are to act like children. This tendency was observed centuries ago.

“Negroes are very credulous and prone to superstition and fanaticism. They sometimes fancy, for instance, that they are conjured or bewitched.”

See the Farrakhan video about the Great Wheel of Death inhabited by extraterrestrial negroes that is preparing to destroy White America.

“Negroes are very imitative, and generally good-natured and light-hearted, taking great delight in music and dancing. They are affectionate toward the whites – particularly to white children, but much less so to each other. They are very careless – thoughtless of the morrow, and remarkably negligent of the sick. … They are cruel and despotic when in power, and the husband is frequently a hard master to his wife, and both are sometimes very severe to the children.”

White people have often observed how African-Americans discipline their children in the grocery store. Blacks are also notorious for their low time preference which is reflected in things like their poor credit ratings and low savings rate. It goes without saying that every people in world history that have encountered negroes have described them as being lighthearted, good natured, lazy, fanciful, musical and childlike. They’re not bad people, but they aren’t like Europeans or East Asians either.

“The negro is innately servile or menial in his character. The African missionaries tell us that the highest ambition of a Guinea negro is to be taken into service of a white man. Free negroes, in our country, exhibit the same trait. How few of them ever become agriculturalists, and subsist by hardy, independent toil! No! They hang about the cities and towns – as barbers, waiters, and lackeys – vassals and body servants to White people. Those very offices which the Anglo-Saxon instinctively repudiates, are greedily sought after by the African, free and slave.”

Blacks are averse to rural areas and the wilderness which is why they are so underrepresented among visitors to the national parks. When Guinea became an independent country under Ahmed Sékou Touré in 1958, a third of the population was still in a condition of slavery. The highest ambition of the Guinea negro is still to become an illegal alien and body servant of a White man in Europe.

Yesterday in Paris:

“Negroes have great reverence for superior strength, opulence, display &c., and they will lose respect for, and confidence in a white man who affects familiarity, and would reduce himself to a level with themselves.”

This is all still true today:

• There is nothing that free negroes seem to delight in more than ostentatious displays of wealth.
• Free negroes also despise the White liberals who submissively fawn all over them.
• Chris Rock and Don Cheadle also wanted Obama to act more “gangsta.” Black people have been put off by Obama’s style of governance which is manufactured by the White liberals who surround him.

Look who has virtually zero black support in the 2020 race:

“The animal propensities very largely predominate in the negro. On the other hand, the imaginative, or aesthetic faculties, are still in a child-like, or infantile condition. He has little mental or intellectual aspiration – little or nothing of the white man’s ambition – “that last infirmity of noble mind.” To eat, drink, sleep, enjoy the sexual relation, and wear fine clothes, undisturbed by any work, or dream of modern progression, would constitute the Paradise of the African. The protective of slavery in restaining the drunkenness, gambling, and licentiousness, in pursuit of which negroes would run riot, can hardly be overestimated.”

See virtually any rap music video.

Better yet, watch this RT documentary about the sapeurs of the Democratic Republic of Congo:

“Mental torpor, intellectual inferiority, and strong animal propensities, make a tout ensemble which would inevitably perish in the competitive Anglo-Saxon spirit. The safety of the African lies only in subordination.”

150 years later, blacks have never adapted to the free-market economy. It is projected that their estimated net worth will approach zero by 2050. There is an irrepressible conflict between black people and the libertarian utopia. Black people are rational to oppose conservatism.

“Our American negro is more virtuous, more industrious, more intelligent, more humanized and spiritualized than his progenitors ever were, or than any African races now are. He owes it to slavery.”

Contrary to what liberals now assume, slavery elevated and improved the American negro. Slavery raised the American negro far above the African mean. African-Americans are the best off blacks in the world and have been so for at least two centuries now. Most of them didn’t want to go to Liberia.

“As might be inferred from his cranial development, the intellect of the negro is in a childlike condition. Professor Agassiz asserts, that a peculiar conformation characterizes the brain of an adult negro. Its development never goes beyond the point attained by the Caucasian, or Anglo-Saxon, in boyhood. In the free schools of the North, where both races are taught together, they get along pretty smoothly until the age of fourteen or sixteen, when the white race takes on a sudden and indefinite expansion, whilst the negroes remain stationary, or even retrograde. Advance to anything resembling the average standard of white adult attainment, is an impossibility.”

As has been noted here several times in the past, there were already integrated public schools in some parts of New England in the antebellum era. The Northern states have been integrated since the 1880s. The Yankee utopian experiment in integration is still a failure after 150 years of trying social equality in practice. No amount of data on the subject or the trillions that have been squandered in pursuit of this El Dorado has been sufficient to shake and disprove their religious belief in racial equality.

“The present war between the Confederate States and the United States, is to determine, in a great measure, the future social and political condition of the negro in America. If the United States succeeds in imposing a military despotism on the South, and this contest can have no other issue save in our separate nationality, the emancipation of our slaves is inevitable. It would effected partly by confiscation and violence, and partly by the future subtle and all powerful pressure of surrounding influences. A more than Mexican anarchy and raid would result. The South instead of becoming the richest, would become the poorest country on the face of the Earth. Every branch of industry would be paralyzed. The fountains of our civilization would be frozen at their source. The whole world would feel the shock.”

Absolutely prophetic.

The Southern economy was destroyed by abolition. It didn’t begin to recover for 75 years after the War Between the States. It is also handicapped by the Civil Rights Movement which has led to a situation where entire metropolitan areas have to be constantly rebuilt in adjacent counties in order to escape from the deplorable conditions created by free blacks in our inner cities.