Confederate History Month 2012: Editors Make War

Dixie

The following excerpts come from Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis. This is a taste of Confederate nationalism taken from the more ethereal level of the Southern Literary Messenger down to the popular level of the Southern masses:

Here’s an excerpt from the Richmond Enquirer:

“Lincoln will be the next President of the United States – Lincoln, who openly avows eternal hatred to the institution of slavery in the South – Lincoln who seeks to overwhelm the people of the South by placing the negro on an equality with free white voters at the polls – Lincoln, whose supporters tell us that “the negroes are more numerous than the Germans, or Irish either, and would have more power in elections than either” – Lincoln, whose bosom friends and advocates seem willing to sink the proud Anglo-Saxon and other European races into one common level with the lowest race of mankind.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Montgomery Mail:

“The recent elections, resulting in the success of Lincoln candidates, shows that the North believes in the doctrine of negro equality. That is the expressed doctrine of their leader, Lincoln. Here in the South, we believe that the white man is better than the negro; and the poorest white man in Alabama would cut the throat of his daughter, before he would marry her to a negro, if he were as rich as Croesus. Horace Greeley, Senator Seward and such representatives of Northern sentiment, would be proud to have buck negroes as their son-in-law. Hamlin, who is on the ticket with Lincoln, is a free negro, and boasts of his African blood.

We may well, then, be united at the South – we white men of the South. If the North chooses to mulattoize itself, that is all right, though we do not believe that communities of mulattoes can long exist on this continent. Let the North, however, be the home of the mixed race; and let the South be the home of the white man, proud of his race, and proud of his race’s superiority!

Amalgamation at the South, as well as at the North, is the programme of and hope of Seward and Greeley. Their aim is to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South. The rich will be able to keep out of the way of the contamination. But the poor white men of the South will not consent to the Seward plan: They will fight to the death, first. We do not know what it is that makes the Southern white man so superior in his instincts, to the Seward class; but it is certain that amalgamation is viewed with horror here. Greeley and Seward and Lincoln my practice it, in their own families, and may recommend it to the whole country; but the white race of the South will never submit. There is no doom that they would not prefer.

But, with the South united – aye, with a single cotton State, to lead the way to independence – all the amalgamationists in the world cannot compel us to submit to their odious and hideous programme … If Lincoln and his free nigger outrider are elected, we must not submit. We must leave the North with its vile free-negroism, to shift for itself … Southern men are white men and intend to continue such!

Note: There is no such thing as a “Rainbow Confederacy.”

In fact, it was the apocalyptic vision of just such a prospect – future generations interacting with the negro on terms of social equality, submerged into the unconstitutional despotism of “consolidated democracy” – that inspired secession and the creation of the Confederacy in the first place.

The violent rejection of American nationalism (or Blue nationalism) is merely the reassertion of Confederate nationalism (or Gray nationalism). The Confederacy was fighting for racialism, white supremacy, slavery, voluntary union, constitutional republicanism, the culture of honor, agrarianism, conservatism, and ethnic separatism.

It was the antipode of contemporary “Americanism.”