They belong to us. We also belong to them. They are divided out among us and mingled up with us, and we with them in a thousand ways. They live with us, eating from the same store-houses, drinking from the same fountains, dwelling in the same enclosures, forming parts of the same families. Our mothers confide us, when infants, to their arms, and sometimes to the very milk of their breasts. Their children [grow up with us] and then, either they stand weeping by our bedside, or we drop a tributary tear by theirs… There they are– behold them. See them all around you, in these streets, in all these dwellings; a race distinct from us, brought into God’s mysterious providence from a foreign land, and placed under our care, and made members of our households. They fill the humblest places in our state and society; they serve us, they give us their strength, yet they are not more truly ours than we are truly theirs.
~ quoted from James O. Farmer The Metaphysical Confederacy pg. 210
The history of the ante-bellum South is a complex matter that our history has simplified to the point of painfulness, and the reason it needs to be re-examined is that as long as we mindlessly excoriate the ante-bellum South in our thinking we end up missing that which was virtuous from the culture those Americans built.