comparative essay on white southerners' awareness of difference between race and slavery

8/14/2019 Comparative essay on white Southerners' awareness of difference between race and slavery

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Consider the readings you have done in Finkelman and Boles, and then using the

primary documents available in Finkelman book, answer the following question in a four

(full) pages essay. Did white southerners understand a difference between race andslavery?

In the last months of the Civil War, southern legislators convened to debate An

Act to increase the military force of the Confederate States. This would be unremarkable

to the modern observer were it not for the fact that these new soldiers were to be raised

from the ranks of the slave class. This disjuncture in the Confederacys military strategy,

from a society fighting to preserve slavery to a society willing to sacrifice the same in

order to survive, reveals an underlying fissure in the heretofore solid racial ideology that

rationalized and legitimized the Souths peculiar institution. If southerners believed that

blacks were physically, morally and intellectually inferior to whites and were naturally

suited to the condition of perpetual servitude, as was the belief underlying the Souths

argument for the continuation of slavery and the formation of a separate nation to

preserve it, how could the proposition that black slaves be given the weapons and the

freedom to fight, like men, for the Confederacy be maintained, being that the majority of

southerners (and even northerners) believed that blacks were neither men nor that they

should be free? This proposition was, nevertheless, maintained and passed into law just

over a month before the War came to an end; too late to have any real effect on the

Confederacys military power (as was its purpose), but none too late to reveal the lengths

to which the slave-holding Confederacy would go to preserve itself and its citizens

nascent national pride.

While the Confederacys acceptance of the use of their former chattel as another

weapon in their war against the North may appear to signal a southern change of heart

regarding blacks or an acceptance of them as brothers in arms, the significance of the


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Actof March 13, 1865 actually lies in its revelation of southern awareness of the

contradictory and circular logic of proslavery thought. In the decades leading up to the

Civil War, hard-line slavery advocates such as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, Thomas R. R.

Cobb of Georgia and two-time Vice President John C. Calhoun used a variety of

arguments and theories to justify the Souths reliance on slave labor. The substance of

these arguments ranged from Classical precedent to sociological necessity and from

Biblical literalism to scientific explanations of genetic determinism. The bulwark of

proslavery thought, however, consisted primarily in a well-formed theory of black racial

inferiority. Arguing for the existence of slavery as a civilizing factor in the lives of blacks,

John C. Calhoun writes, never before has the black race of Central Africaattained a

condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and

intellectually (Finkelman, 58). Calhouns assumption about the intellectual achievement

and moral and physical development of the black race of Central Africa, though

doubtlessly based on ethnocentric and ill-informed historiography, counts among the

more optimistic opinions of proslavery writers about black peoples abilities. Perhaps

more typical are the comments of one of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson: the

blacksare inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mindThis

unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the

emancipation of these people (53-54). Post-emancipation author Josiah C. Nott reveals

the same contemptible view of black achievement in the free South when he states that

the Negro has no excuse, but that of race, for the want of agriculture, art and science

(208).


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The logical conclusion of proslavery theories of race (as aphoristically penned in

the above quotes) is the complete subjugation of the black race as slaves to the white

race. For this reason, the existence of free blacks in southern cities (not to mention in the

North) posed a problem to theories of black racial inferiority; for, in some cases, free

blacks tended to achieve a remarkable degree of success in all aspects of their lives, and

this in spite of their precarious legal status in southern slave society. Most proslavery

theorists shrugged off the nominal presence of successful free blacks as a consequence of

interaction with white society. In much the same way that slavery was argued to

civilize black people, Edmund Ruffin made the argument that free blacks have derived

more than compensating benefits from their position, in the protection of government to

person and property, and the security of both, and exemption from the evils of war, and

from great oppression by any stronger power (75). In a more contemptuous tone, Nott

states The Negrois imitative, social, easily domesticated, and, as long as kept in

subordination to a higher race, will ape to a certain extent its manners and customs

(205), and this from a man who claimed to have none but the kindest feelings towards

the Freedmen (211). As the above writers assert, self-determination was not a factor in

the lives of free blacks so much as the influence and active support of the white society

that engulfed them. Some proslavery theorists even tried to argue that blacks preferred

the condition of slavery to freedom. Samuel A. Cartwright, comparing African political

systems to the democratic system of free people in America: they have always

preferreda government combining the legislative, judicial and executive powers in the

same individual, in the person of a petty king, or a chieftain or masterin America, if left

alone, they always prefer the same kind of government, which we call slavery (160).


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Indeed, Cartwright was apparently so abhorrent to the idea that blacks might not like

enslavement that he conjured up a scientific explanation for the phenomenon of

runaways: Draptomania, the Disease Causing Slaves to Run Away (165). But the

reliance of proslavery thought on racial theory was perhaps best encapsulated by Ruffin

when discussing the modest success of free blacks: A very few have acquired

considerable amounts of property. But these rare qualities were not hereditary and the

children of these superior individuals would be as like as others to fall back to the

ordinary condition of their class (76). In other words, blacks could not be anything other

than slaves because their genetic make-up would not allow them to succeed in freedom

for more than a generation!

In spite of the proslavery arguments necessity of a complete association of blacks

with slavery, proslavery writers were hard-pressed to bridge the gap between the ideology

of black racial inferiority and the empirical reality of black communities and individuals

living and succeeding in freedom. By 1865, the logic of the proslavery argument was

further challenged when southern soldiers found themselves face to face on the battlefield

against their former property: armed and uniformed, black Union soldiers. Their

presence, along with the need for an alliance with the anti-slavery British, alerted some

southerners to the advantage that black soldiers could give to the Confederacy, which, in

turn, raised a specter of doubt in the originally conceived Rebel cause and initiated the

proposal that threatened the ideological basis of the slave labor system. The passage of

theActof March 13, 1865 signaled Southern concession to the long-denied

inconsistencies of proslavery arguments and theories of black racial inferiority and

revealed southern awareness of the difference between race and slavery.

comparative essay on white southerners' awareness of difference between race and slavery

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