TODAY'S SOUTHERN BIGOTS AND THE CIVIL WAR

            Now, two days before the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the news tells of the outrage in Florida by a group of people who still commemorate the actions of Confederate soldiers. They are violently opposed to the erection of a monument to Union soldiers in a park where Confederate soldiers are honored. This tells us a great deal about the modern South. There are still millions of white people down there who would be happy with the return of Black slavery. They mourn the loss of the old South with its terrible and inhumane treatment of Negro human beings. They are an example of America at its most ignorant, bigoted, stupid, and backward. They will tell you that the Civil War was about States Rights and about economic issues. Well, they are right, it was about one huge economic issue--slavery. 

             The fact that the cause of the Civil War was slavery is clear from the pronouncements of all the leaders of that time. Lincoln made it emphatically clear in his Second Inaugural Address when he said: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” The arguments made today by right-wing apologists for the Southern cause are spurious at best.

            What is not fully understood is the reason why slavery was so important a ground for conflict between the North and the South. It was not simply racial bigotry that caused the South to so fervently support the institution of slavery. It was money and greed. Slaves were considered property, and a very large percentage of the wealth of southern planters was tied-up in slaves. To the southerners, abolition of slavery meant abolition of much of their fortune. In addition, refusal of the government to allow the expansion of slavery to the western part of the country meant a stark restriction on where and to whom slave holders could sell their slaves. Lincoln said: “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.”

            The powerful hatred between North and South was generated by the fear in the South that the North planned to take away a very large part of southern treasure. For this, the southerners were willing to fight to the death.

            It is immaterial that many of the common southern soldiers did not own slaves. Like everyone today who wishes to become more affluent, they looked upon slavery as a way to gain riches, and considered the institution of slavery to be a proper capitalist endeavor. They also looked upon Black slaves as animals that, like any other form of property, could and should be bought and sold. In addition, poor ignorant whites who lived lives of quiet desperation were happy to have someone to look down on. Much of that is still true today. 

            Even the southern slave holders knew that slavery was wrong. They clung to it because of its importance to their economy. They could not simply free their slaves without giving-up much of their wealth. Those few who did free their slaves showed a lot of courage and humanity.

Slavery was, after all, a gigantic horror. In my mind it is second only to the Nazi Holocaust in evil. Regardless of whether slave traders and slave owners thought that Black people were inferior, they knew that they were human beings and not just animals. Many felt deep pangs of conscience at the exploitation of their fellow men, and some people, like the Englishman Wilberforce and the American William Lloyd Garrison, could not tolerate such evil.

The legacy of slavery today is a divided America. It is not just divided between whites and blacks. It is divided between rich and poor, northerners and southerners, liberals and conservatives, educated and uneducated, intelligent and ignorant people. It is no coincidence that the most conservative parts of America are in the South where slavery was prevalent, or that the most liberal areas are in the North where abolitionism prevailed. The legacy of racial intolerance which once belonged to southern Democrats now belongs to southern racists called Republicans or Tea Party adherents. They continue to recite all of the old slogans and canards of states’ rights, smaller government, and freedom from governmental interference, but what they really want is the right to continue their discrimination against and mistreatment of African Americans. They deeply resent the fact that some of their tax dollars are spent to aid poor Black people, and that the government is the main enforcer of the civil rights of Blacks.