Casus Belli, 1861

Tell me again how the American Civil War somehow wasn’t about slavery:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Continue reading

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The Truths We Hold

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

U.S. Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union, February 2, 1861 Continue reading

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My Take on “Abolitionist Porn”

SlavesForSaleNewOrleans1861John Derbyshire and I have something in common: I haven’t seen the movie 12 Years a Slave, either. I suspect that is where our similarities end, though.

If you are not familiar with Derbyshire’s work, the National Review fired him last year, essentially for being too much of a racist hack. That should really speak volumes. I’m not going to waste any significant time or bandwidth on Derbyshire’s rantings about 12 Years a Slave, except to summarize that he has identified a genre he calls “abolitionist porn” that overstates how bad slavery was. For some good takedowns of his hackery, see Brian Tashman, Ed Brayton, and PZ Myers.

We do have one additional, very superficial, similarity that I might mention. Derbyshire concludes his “abolitionist porn” screed with a statement that, minus the specific context, I find to be valid and truthful:

In the matter of slavery, though, I already feel sure that the shallow good North, bad South simplicities of Abolitionist Porn and popular perception bear little relation to the thorny tangles of reality.

I suspect that Derbyshire is trying to say that the South wasn’t really that bad, and that’s where I strongly dissent. I would instead posit that the North, applying the standards of today, wasn’t really that good. Continue reading

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The Civil War Really Was About Slavery. Who Knew?

Out of a snarky Twitter exchange, a small research project was born. A fellow who tweets under the name @defendheritage tweeted the following:

…which led to an appropriately snarky response from JC Christian:

That got me thinking about how people try to say the Civil War was about almost anything except slavery. The most common alternative rationale for the Civil War is “states’ rights [to allow slavery],” which I took the liberty of amending just now. Continue reading

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