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Race and the South, Part I:
The Real Case against Slavery

by Sam G. Dickson

Editor’s Note: This essay, which will appear online in three parts, is
from Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect: Essays on
the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time (The Occidental Press,
2006), available for purchase here.

“Across our path stands the South with a flaming sword”—W. E. B.
Dubois

" Seven weeks after the election of 1856, in which the Republican Party offered its first candidate for the US presidency, Robert E. Lee expressed his views on the slavery issue in a letter to his wife:

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will
acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political
evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.
I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race,
and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter,
my sympathies are more strong for the former.[1] [Emphasis added.]

Lee’s views are the most sensible opinion on the slavery issue for a
number of reasons. His statement recognizes that what is morally and
politically acceptable in one age changes over time and that slavery
had become an undesirable institution. Lee thus refrains from joining
in the shrill, self-righteous, judgmental denunciation of the past,
which is the stock in trade of modern political correctness. He is
sympathetic, to some degree even “strongly,” with an alien race.

What makes Lee’s statement most noteworthy in our own era, however, is
that, while he sympathizes with the black race, he quite sensibly
states that his first and foremost concern in weighing the merits of
slavery is whether it is good for white people.

Today, the media would annihilate anyone making such a remark. Such is
the strength of the liberal/Marxist grip on our society, so narrow are
the parameters of permissible public discussion in modern, “free”
America, that no matter of public policy may be evaluated on the basis
of whether it is good for or harmful to white people.

Surely, thoughtful people must concede that it is a remarkable state
of affairs when it is impermissible and even immoral to consider the
interests of the founding stock, the central core of the nation, which
even now constitutes a huge majority of the population, in formulating
public policy. Nor does this extraordinary achievement of the left in
fettering public debate on racial issues stop at the Mason-Dixon line.
It is present throughout the South. Even more amazing, it is found—and
to a huge degree—among the very elements of the South who claim to be
conscious, unreconstructed Southerners.

If Lee were to return today and make his remarks in a meeting of the
Sons of Confederate Veterans or similar organizations, he would meet
with, at best, a very chilly reception. It is almost certain that his
views would be publicly repudiated by persons in leadership positions.
Indeed, it is quite conceivable that someone holding the racial views
of Lee, Jefferson Davis, or Alexander H. Stephens would be requested
to leave or even be formally expelled from most Southern heritage
organizations. Such is the extent to which public discussion of the
race issue has been suppressed in our country and even in our region.

The desperate desire to avoid dealing openly, honestly and frankly
with racial issues has given rise to a virtual cottage industry of
rewriting and inventing a fictitious history of the South and race
relations. Neo-Confederates are determined to sanitize the history of
the Confederacy and of the South in general by depicting their
forebears as conforming to modern liberal standards of racial
equality. In books, in periodicals, in speeches, on the Internet, and
elsewhere a bowdlerized, censored, and distorted history of race and
race relations in the South is peddled, and peddled, alas, to an eager
audience. Wild statements are made about the role of blacks in the
Confederacy, for example the claim of neo-Confederate J. H. Segars
that by the “the most conservative estimates . . . 50,000 to 60,000”
blacks served in Confederate units.[2]

Many Southerners in the heritage movement itself appear to be so
psychologically whipped by the incessant barrage of racial hate
propaganda aimed at them and at whites in the nation as a whole that
they believe, in stark contrast to Lee’s primary focus on his own
people, that the Confederacy can only be justified by showing that it
was somehow beneficial to or supported by blacks, Jews, Indians, or
Hispanics. It is irrelevant or even morally repugnant to such people
to consider what role whites played in the Confederacy or whether the
Confederacy was good for white people.

As will be shown later in this essay, the arguments and authorities
advanced by the neo-Confederates are contrary to historical fact and
are easily refuted. As unpleasant for them as it may be to accept, the
truth is that the history of the South has been significantly
dominated and shaped by the struggle between the two principal races
virtually from the time that a Dutch ship of unknown name landed the
first African slaves at Jamestown, Virginia, to the present hour.

That this has been warp and woof of Southern history is not
deplorable. As Southern historian U. B. Phillips wrote in 1928, the
South:

is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having
common joys and common sorrows, and above all, as to the white folk a
people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be
and remain a white man’s country. The consciousness of a function in
these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or
maintained with a patrician’s quietude, is the cardinal test of a
Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.[3]

That this is so is not proof, as Marxist and liberal egalitarians
would claim, of the “burden” of Southern history or the wickedness and
immorality of the white South. It is simply the normal state of human
affairs. History shows that wherever two distinct and dissimilar
people with different interests and destinies occupy the same turf,
they contend with each other and vie with each other for control of
it. This was true of Spain during the Middle Ages, when Christian
Europeans and Moslem Moors fought each other to determine whether
Spain would be European and Christian or Moorish and Mohammedan. The
same is still true today. Wherever one looks—whether in Cyprus,
Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, South Africa, or elsewhere—
diversity, rather than producing human happiness and peace, is almost
invariably the cause of antagonism, struggle, upheaval, and violence.
Only in the silly “let’s pretend” and “make-believe” world of the
liberal/Marxist is this not so.

Like Lee, I am primarily interested in the well-being of my own race.
This does not necessarily mean that I hate other racial groups.
However, it does mean that I wish my own race to be preeminent, for
the society in which I live to be organized and operated primarily for
my own race’s best interests. Such an attitude is permitted,
tolerated, and even encouraged and fomented today in America . . . for
blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Asians, Indians, and others. In short, for
every single group . . . except whites.

It is not remarkable that the favored groups, “the support groups of
the regime” as one person has characterized them, should like this
state of affairs and seek to maintain it with all the means at their
disposal. It follows that they eagerly cooperate in the psychological
war waged upon European whites in America in order to demoralize and
defeat their racial competitors for mastery. What is remarkable,
however, is that whites in general and white Southerners in particular
should accept the idea that it is immoral for their ancestors to have
sought—or for them to seek now—the interests of their own group.

If there is an afterlife for pioneer Northern racial egalitarians such
as William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, they
must be looking down with astonishment and delight to see the
descendants of Lee’s soldiers vying with each other to try to prove
that the antebellum and wartime South held the racial views of the
most extreme New England abolitionists. Could there be any victory
more complete than to have the descendants of one’s own defeated foes
embrace the victor’s principles and repudiate those of their
ancestors?

This must astonish (and secretly delight and gratify) the most
determined enemies of the South. As Dr. Brooks D. Simpson of Arizona
State University gloated on the web page of Morris Dees’ Southern
Poverty Law Center:

There is a strange paradox here. These people deride what they call
political correctness, and yet one of their first missions is to
whitewash the Confederacy of any connection with slavery. They
actually seem sensitive to any possibility that the Confederacy is
linked with race, and want to absolve the Confederacy of any charges
of racism at all.[4]

The Southerners of the Confederacy (and afterward, from the resistance
to Reconstruction and the institution of “Jim Crow” through the
“massive resistance” to the race-mixing initiatives of the federal
government in the 1950s and 1960s) were not like that, as Lee’s
remarks quoted at the beginning of this essay suggest (and that quote
is comparatively moderate compared to other statements by this most
revered Southern leader, e.g., Lee’s postwar statement in testimony
before a Radical Republican congressional committee that the freed
blacks should be expelled from Virginia.)[5]

As Lee indicated, slavery was bad. The clearest reason it was bad,
from the standpoint of white interests, is that it imported into the
midst of a white, European people a large, alien, non-white race that,
as we see today, constitutes a threat to the survival of our race and
its civilization and may yet contribute to our downfall.

As Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia said in his speech in favor of
Georgia’s secession from the Union, “In 1790 we had less than 800,000
slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system, they
have increased above 4,000,000.”[6]

Slavery thus incubated the South’s problems. Had there existed a
sufficient level of racial cohesion among whites, the emergence of a
large, alien race in our midst would never have been tolerated. Part
of this lack of racial cohesion may be found in class conflict within
our own racial community, from antebellum times down to the present
day. Slavery was of course to the material benefit of wealthy slave
owners, but it was disadvantageous for middle class and working class
whites, for the small, independent yeoman farmer.

Like most Southerners, I have ancestors who owned slaves and others
who did not. During my childhood, my relatives took great pride in
those branches of the family tree that were the wealthy, slaveholding
ones. Now, from the perspective of late middle age, I have come to
entertain reservations about these slaveholding ancestors. I see them
in many respects as precursors of the corporate interests in our
society that are colonizing our nation with Third World aliens: quite
willing to burden America and its white posterity with rival, sullen,
and hostile racial aliens so that these interests can obtain cheap
labor at the expense of white Americans.

Little has been written about the burdens borne by non-slaveholding
whites in the antebellum South. Those burdens were not light. The non-
slaveholders were required to spend their weekends drilling in militia
groups and slave patrols to protect their communities from slave
uprisings. Such uprisings were a real menace, as the example of Haiti
abroad and the experiences of the Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner
rebellions in the South itself demonstrated.[7]

Non-slaveholders were forced to compete against slave labor,
cheapening the quality of production in the South and degrading the
white working classes, just as today native-born white workers are
expected to allow themselves to be degraded financially and otherwise
in competition with cheap Latin American or Asian labor. White farm
owners had to shoulder taxes to protect the slave property of wealthy
plantation-owning whites and to protect the slave owner and white
society from those slaves. Ultimately, they had to die in a war
largely occasioned by the problem of African slavery. During that war,
owners of large numbers of slaves were exempt from service in the
Confederate army, while independent farmers had to go off to the
front.

The abolitionist program would have increased (and ultimately did
increase) the burdens and dangers to working and middle class whites
posed by the presence of racial aliens. Governor Joseph E. Brown, who
came from the mountainous area of north Georgia, which was virtually
slave-free, but who nevertheless supported secession, recognized this
fact in speaking of the problems that would ensue if the blacks were
freed:

The Negro therefore, comes into competition with the poor White man,
when he seeks to rent land on which to make his bread, or a shelter to
protect his wife and his little ones, from the cold and from the rain;
and when he seeks employment as a day laborer. In every such case if
the Negro will do the work the cheapest, he must be preferred. It is
sickening to contemplate the miseries of our poor White people under
these circumstances.[8]

In such facts we dimly foresee the same problematical class divisions
among white people as to the racial issues of today.

This split in white racial solidarity occurred again after the defeat
of the Confederacy, during Reconstruction. The rich “Bourbons,” on the
one hand, and the yeoman white working and middle classes, on the
other, were in significant disagreement about the necessity of
formally or informally suppressing black political participation.[9]

The factor of economic class rears its divisive head all through
Southern history, from the willingness of the rich planters to import
racial aliens to do their manual labor for them down to the struggle
against desegregation (in which the greatest enemy to the South was
the Chamber of Commerce) to the selfish yuppie of today, only too
happy to burden future generations with yet another alien group so
long as he can get an illegal Mexican to rake his lawn for a couple of
dollars less than he would have to pay a white neighbor’s teenage
son...."



http://www.toqonline.com/2009/05/rac...-south-part-i/