Secessionist Emissaries: Creating the Confederacy

Why was secession necessary?

Dixie

We can bury out back the silly Baby Boomer idea that our Southern heritage has nothing to do with race. It had absolutely everything to do with race. Everyone knew at the time that the South was a White Man’s Country.

The only people in America at the time who advocated anything resembling the multiracial democracy of BRA that we have today were radical abolitionists like John Brown and Black Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner:

“Southerners drew on a wide range of disunion images in their responses to the Republican victory in 1860. As Charles B. Dew shows, when the Deep South secessionists formed the Confederacy after Lincoln’s election urged the Upper South to join the new nation, they focused on the perils of remaining in an abolitionized Union, conjuring up specters of slave insurrection, race competition, and race mixing. This dystopian litany had been pressed into service repeatedly during the antebellum decades by proslavery forces seeking political leverage and protection within the Union – now it serve to prove that the Union was irredeemably corrupt.”

“The central argument of the fire-eaters was that the Republican contempt for the South would grow as Republican electoral power grew.  … The inevitable Republican victory would have disastrous consequences that would exceed the “most exaggerated fears or extravagant fancies of the Southern mind” – the South would like prostrate before the rapacious North as it imposed abolition, race and class war, and moral degradation on the region.”

Sometimes, in a convenient elision, the Democratic press referred to the “Black Republican Know Nothing party,” a coalition united so Democrats alleged, by its determination to “overthrow … our glorious Union.” In lockstep with Southern papers, the party organ, the Democratic Review, based in New York, fumed that Republicans had “incorporated in their disunion creed” the dread doctrines of “womans-rights-ism” and “socialism” and “whatever cause … a frenzied brain might find attraction in.” The opposition, in other words, represented not only sectionalism but also infidelity to the divinely ordained social hierarchy.

Some Northern Democrats tried to draw a moral and functional distinction between Southern and Northern invocations of disunion. When Calhoun had used the word, the Democratic Review opined, he had done so with “melancholy grandeur.” But when abolitionists and Republicans spoke of disunion, they were geniuses of “evil-doing.” Thus the younger generation of fire-eaters who “blurted out the filthy, execrable word” did so only because abolitionists who “deify niggers” had provoked them to, “pandering to a vicious craving after excitement.”

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38 Comments

  1. “Everyone knew at the time that the South was a White Man’s Country.”

    LOL!!! Hardly a serious statement considering the fact that unlike the North, the South was full of niggers! (Exceeding 50% in South Carolina and still well over 50% in many Southern counties even today.)

  2. In the North, white men were the equals of niggers, who were their fellow citizens and voters in at least five states in New England. Blacks had the liberty to marry White women.

    In the South, White men were the owners of niggers, who worked on plantations as serfs in a caste based society to support a republican aristocracy. Blacks were not citizens. They were not voters. They did not even have “civil rights” like the right to marry or own firearms.

    The South was a “White Man’s Country” because it was explicitly based on race, sex, and caste. Unlike the North, it was not based on “speculative notions” like “liberty” and “equality.”

    “Liberty” in the South meant “the niggers” worked. Liberty in the North was some kind of universal abstraction. “Equality” in the South meant that every White man was the equal of every other White man. “Equality” in the North was a universal abstraction.

    In the North, there were debates about whether “liberty” and “equality” applied to negroes, women, and Indians. In the Antebellum era, the South didn’t have these debates. It was a society based on racial feudalism.

  3. Idk. Not sure you can boil down the whole traiditonal “South” to the ‘planter aristocracy,’ which is what the North propaganda has always done. MANY people who count themselves southerners, and who fought, identify less with that than the Ulster plantation experience, being early to the country and on the Appalachian frontier. This is not ‘deep south,’ but the people really ARE southern.

    THAT end of things is rural (and has this in common with planters—even if others are working the feilds, a certain mindset goes with planting, whatever position one occupies in it). It is rural, and where a man might rule his roost, he does not wish to be ‘beholden,’ not to own or be owned, but to be free of servitude, generally. A frontier mentality, but southern, not western or mid-northern. They pride themselves in humility, honesty (the brutal kind, the kind others don’t like), the presbyterians, baptists.

    They didn’t want to be ruled by the king or pope, and both seemed about the same, seems like. The kind who see Vatican II as the imposition of another religion, in what was supposed to be a country with “freedom of religion.” Obviously, if one can have Vat II imposed, there is no ‘freedom of religion.” If the pope is an acknowledged state, as he is, (with an embassy s/a Regan gave him), then that is the imposition of foreign power and as unconstitutional as being ruled by other races.

    If it came down to having to chose, they would go loyalist, imo. At least queens and kings (who they haven’t dealt with directly for centuries running) reference blood. The pope is an Ideology based Rule, exactly like communism, (if you think about it).

    They didn’t love the planters—- although they shared the whole Planting Ethos, as they were farmers, also, and jacks of all trades, and there is a similarity, a ‘class consciousness’ among fronteir farming stock— whether aristocrats/caveliers or not.

    In this way, though, some of the poor descendents of Ulster have more in common with the cavaliers descendents than either have with Yankees, and later-day yankees (the ones who took their place.)

    Anyway, all the south is not planting aristocracy. And that is the idea the NOrth teaches in its schools. The “south” cut across lines of class, in the sense of not wanting to be ruled by outsiders, as they are today.

  4. In the Antebellum South, there was a type of racialism that was deeper and more radical than anything that exists among “White Nationalists” in our times.

    Southern Whites didn’t simply believe in racial differences. They believed that negroes were an “inferior race.” Correspondingly, Southern Whites were the “master race.” The inferior race didn’t have what we would identify as rights.

    God had created this inferior race. The purpose of this inferior race was to work for White people who were the master race. The domestic institution of negro slavery was divinely sanctioned by the creator of the universe.

    It was part of the natural order where God was above man in the social hierarchy who was responsible for his wife and children. The family was responsible for their animals and slaves.

    Toward the end of the Antebellum era, there were theories of polygenesis. Southerners like Josiah C. Nott were speculating that blacks were a separate species that had a separate origin from White people.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Clark_Nott

  5. dixiegirl,

    In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley where I am from, around 50 percent of White families owned slaves. The planter class (which is defined as those who owned more than 20 slaves) owned about 55 percent or so of the slaves in the Valley.

    The planters owned the majority of the slaves here, but they were a small minority among total slaveowners. The typical slaveowner wasn’t a planter. Slavery was typically a White family that owned a African-American family.

    The Old South was a feudal society with a planter upper class of landed gentry and a broad middle class of smaller slaveowners and a lower class of non-slaveholding farmers. It was a fluid society where middle class slaveowners could easily become planters and non-slaveholders could become slaveholders.

    If anything is true, it was fairer than the capitalist society that exists today, where speculators own most stocks and bonds and live off capital, but the typical investor only has a small financial portfolio centered around his retirement.

    The planters lived off the labor of blacks. The modern capitalist is a speculator like George Soros who lives off ripping other White people.

  6. dixiegirl writes:

    “A frontier mentality, but southern, not western”

    If you think hillbillies are any more freedom loving than Westerners then you’re dreamin’.

  7. I wouldn’t take the idea that the South was developing a “republican aristocracy” based on a planter class. If anything being a Southern farmer, managing & caring for Black slaves had to be hard work. It may have payed well—but—knowing the nature of the Blacks you can be sure it wasn’t easy!

    Can you imagine having an African village on your farm, near your home?

  8. “If anything being a Southern farmer, managing & caring for Black slaves had to be hard work.”

    The overseers and plantation managers did that sort of work. You really need to understand about the functions of the supervisor, managerial, and executive classes.

  9. Hunter,

    You should block the nigger posting kitty porn on your site. If nigger’s intent was to enrage, then he has succeeded. I want nothing more than to inflict infinite pain on the black bastard.

  10. “LOL!!! Hardly a serious statement considering the fact that unlike the North, the South was full of niggers! (Exceeding 50% in South Carolina and still well over 50% in many Southern counties even today.)”

    Ya but you really should do a weighted average of human factors like intelligence, empathy and civic engagement. Say, 3/5 adjustment.

  11. great post dixiegirl

    as for blackman, i’d be appalled someone posted that but I don’t expect any better from moon-crickets

  12. i’m sorry if i offended, but i guess whites are still unable to accept that blacks can play a positive role in their lives, at least for their kids. i mean white kids tend to like black people more than white adults do. whites are creepy to kids. blacks are nice and open about everyting.

    does the girl to the right on that pic appear afraid to you? she is completely at ease, as she is one the other pics which i doubt would be welcomed here given the hateful reactions above.

  13. @: Hunter at 6:20
    This from Woodson’s 1918 study The Beginnings of Miscegination In America. It clearly shows how aware black were of the benefit of race mixing and how it was part of a long term strategy to get rid of the whites. Marcus Garvey in his debates with other blacks of the time makes it very clear that this was a major goal of black leadership. A leadership who know that time would be on their time. Garvey was of course against it. But I run on.
    Here is what whites living in Philadelphia would have been aware of:

    (quoting Thomas Branagan )

    There are many, very many blacks who … begin to feel themselves consequential, … will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances…. I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the Southern States). I know a black man who seduced a young white girl … who soon after married him, and died with a broken heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to have a negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after married a white woman. … There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are thousands of black children by them at present.”[476]
    [Pg 349]
    “The history of…” was first published in the Journal of Negro History, Oct 1918.

    You should have no problem in finding it if you care to read more.

    One should keep this passage in mind when we often see the claim that lynching of blacks who attacked white women were done not because of a sense of white genetic interest but for economic reasons. Many feminist writers love to push this on to their college classes.

  14. “i mean seriously, whites suck so badly that they can’t even prevent this kind of stuff from happening:”

    Sadly, the two kaffirs are robuster specimens than the weird little imp girls. Must be Africa — observe the landscape, and the adjusted demeanor of the kaffirs.

  15. “We can bury out back the silly Baby Boomer idea that our Southern heritage has nothing to do with race. It had absolutely everything to do with race. Everyone knew at the time that the South was a White Man’s Country.”

    Indeed. And one need not dig very long into the actual perceptions of the inhabitants of the South, as preserved in letters, to discover this worldview. Their world was one in which white men were implicitly better, by right of civilization, than a captive race brought in for hard labor. On this point even leftists agree. Dixiegirl makes a valid point regarding hillbillies, I think, and 50% ownership of slaves doesn’t prove much in my opinion, but even at .50% ownership, the principle would have held that whites are better than blacks — and that’s what counts, even when empirically wrong: that the entire populace considers itself above another.

    “If it came down to having to chose, they would go loyalist, imo. At least queens and kings (who they haven’t dealt with directly for centuries running) reference blood. ”

    … their blood, not the commoners’. Commoners don’t support royalty because of blood-romanticism; they do so because it’s a more tangible figurehead of their local roots than rationalist abstractions, one of which is “blood”, as we understand it.

    “Anyway, all the south is not planting aristocracy. And that is the idea the NOrth teaches in its schools.”

    True. I mean, you can’t till in mountains … or the sandy soil here in Florida for that matter. You have to trap things to eat.

    “The “south” cut across lines of class, in the sense of not wanting to be ruled by outsiders, as they are today.”

    Eh. I don’t know where you live, but I’ve been all around the South, and this is a minority sentiment — the sort of thing old timers boast of at open-air fiddle concerts between mouthfuls of fried dough. It’s dead, in a word. But as a swamp Yankee I don’t humor you Crackers’ romantic ideas of yourselves.

  16. “Dixiegirl makes a valid point regarding hillbillies, I think, and 50% ownership of slaves doesn’t prove much in my opinion”

    It doesn’t prove much because it’s true. Only 25% of whites in the South owned slaves and the percentage of those who owned them in the Appalachians was closer to zero.

    And to correct yet another ignorant statement about there not being slaves in Florida: Florida blacks made up 45% of the population.

  17. Uh… wrong again:

    “Their world was one in which white men were implicitly better, by right of civilization, than a captive race brought in for hard labor.”

    This was also the prevailing view in the North nowithstanding a handful of freed slaves that were granted some rights in Congregationalist/Unitarian New England.

  18. We can bury out back the silly Baby Boomer idea that our Southern heritage has nothing to do with race. It had absolutely everything to do with race. Everyone knew at the time that the South was a White Man’s Country.

    A white man’s country, or a Southern man’s country? The South had an entire way of life all its own, of which slavery (and the beliefs about race the institution implied) was thought to be a component, however significant and defining. It was feared, as I understand it, that the eradication of slavery would lead to the extinction of an entire and unique way of life, but it was the way of life in total – one in which Southrons and Southern culture, rather than just whites, had primary place – that was to be preserved at all cost, not just its racial component. It seems to me that the South would have fought just as hard against becoming, for instance, a post-Christian, secular materialist nation, even if a white one.

    If the South feared that the enemy had “incorporated in their disunion creed” the dread doctrines of “womans-rights-ism” and “socialism” and “whatever cause … a frenzied brain might find attraction in” and that they represented not only sectionalism but also infidelity to the divinely ordained social hierarchy, and white Supremacy was only part of that social hierarchy, isn’t it reductionism to insist that Southern heritage has “absolutely everything to do with race”?

    I guess what I’m saying is that Dixie was Southern, Anglo-Celtic and Christian. If one seeks to establish anything different, is one really re-establishing Dixie? Dixie’s standards seem to me to have been higher, or more exacting, than white nationalism’s, and Southern nationalism and white nationalism do not seem to me to be synonymous.

  19. It doesn’t prove much because it’s true. Only 25% of whites in the South owned slaves and the percentage of those who owned them in the Appalachians was closer to zero.

    Yep. I’m aware of the figures. I’ve read books too. By “doesn’t prove much”, and opposing a totally arbitrary and exaggerated counter-figure, I meant to imply that HW was overemphasizing ownership among poor Anglo-Celtic whites to downplay the obvious class conflict.

    And to correct yet another ignorant statement about there not being slaves in Florida: Florida blacks made up 45% of the population

    As far as I know, and this from very scattered reading, Florida was a favorite destination for FMCs and not a major slave state nor player in the War; their holdings I believe were a fraction of the other states’. The surplus came after the matter had been settled.

    This was also the prevailing view in the North nowithstanding a handful of freed slaves that were granted some rights in Congregationalist/Unitarian New England.

    ‘Tis true. And the South, especially among those freedom-loving hillbillies, did not lack its vocal minority of abolitionists.

  20. Most of the Whites in the South were women and children.

    If you count by household, 50 percent of White families in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley were slaveowners. The planter class owned a slight majority of slaves (something like 55 percent), but were a small minority among total slaveowners.

    I can easily find the exact numbers for the Valley where I come from. I intended to review a book about the subject which came out a month or two ago.

  21. “Most of the Whites in the South were women and children.”

    Let’s be clear about this. Only 25% of the households in the South owned slaves whatever the numbers might have been in one particular area.

    Another point, slavery in Florida went all the way back to Spanish colonization. Centuries before English settlers ever showed up.

  22. What percentage of Yankees were nigger lovers? There were 160,000 to 180,000 negroes in the Union Army fighting for abolitionism, black citizenship, and negro equality.

    Surely, the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the outrage over the Dred Scott decision in Yankeeland, not to mention the actual Yankees like Robert Gould Shaw who fought at the head of negro armies, indicates that this was a widespread sentiment in the Northern states.

  23. It certainly varied regionally. The “butternuts” of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio fought in some numbers for the South. Kentucky and Missouri both had multiple disputed conventions where a majority of the counties participating voted both for and against leaving the Union. Maryland would certainly have voted for secession had Lincoln not arbitrarily and illegally arrested the pro-Confederate members of the legislature.

    Much of the rest of the North was certainly split on the issue of slavery and outside of New England there was no support at all for giving Negroes citizenship or even the right of residency even after the illegal and unconstitutional Emancipation proclamation. Their were draft riots in the major Northern cities and McClellan did considerably better among Northern voters in the 1864 election than had the Democrats in 1860. The Radical Republicans were the majority faction of the Republican caucus in Congress but a minority of the Congress as a whole.

    The war was an unnecessary and genocidal catastrophe for the white race in America. It was Democratic Party fools like Justice Taney and the imbecilic President Buchanan that let the hard fought gains of the famous Compromise legislations fall by the wayside resulting in 600,000 white deaths.

    The Civil War was a dysgenic racial and economic disaster for the South and those who praise the way it was done are dumb-ass romantic fools.

  24. For the record, Florida was the third state to secede and was die-hard in its support for the Confederacy. A lot of its men were sent northward to fight in the war but there were also intrastate battles with federal forces that hadn’t been withdrawn and with naval landings. Pro-Southern, pro-Confederate feelings are still among the highest in the entire South in north Florida all the way from the Atlantic to Pensacola. If state secession movements continue to pick up momentum I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a healthy campaign for a Florida break up.

  25. “If state secession movements continue to pick up momentum”

    What “state secession movements? Name one state whose legislature has called for a convention or vote on secession.

    Oh, not one? No kidding.

  26. Did I say it had reached that stage? No, I said if they continue to pick up momentum. They being the independent orgs that exist in at least 25 states. I was referring to the increasing popularity of the idea and how it could conceivably work out in Florida. I mentioned it in order to characterize the difference in the regions of that state. Lighten up.

  27. “I was referring to the increasing popularity of the idea and how it could conceivably work out in Florida.”

    Florida? Maybe in the panhandle. The whole southern half of the state is full of nothing but Yankees, Jews, and Cubans.

  28. Florida natives are likely to stay put there.

    The transplants don’t have any deep roots in the region. The Jews in South Florida are retirees who will die out over the next twenty years. The transplants have come to Florida because of the suburban sprawl economy. The Cubans came to escape from Castro.

    What happens to Florida though when the tourism industry collapses? What happens when the suburban sprawl economy dies? What happens when the Castro brothers are overthrown in Cuba?

    Florida is already well on the way toward its future. It is losing population now to other states. It has shed hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

  29. “Florida? Maybe in the panhandle. The whole southern half of the state is full of nothing but Yankees, Jews, and Cubans.”

    Thanks for the info. I have lived in Florida for most of my life.

  30. “Thanks for the info. I have lived in Florida for most of my life.”

    Then you shouldn’t be making stupid statements about how secession could work in Florida.

  31. For the reasons that have been pointed out, Florida is likelier to break in two than is California. Technically, that would be a secession, and it would boost secessionism in general. I point this out in case you’re a moron instead of someone with plenty of time on his hands and a boring sense of humor.

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