“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…” - St. John, 8:7
February is Black History Month in Virginia, and it is awash in vitriolic, virtue-posting Confederaphobia, Blackface scandals, resolutions apologizing for lynchings in the past, clamorings for removal of Latter-Day-designated “Jim Crow” monuments, picking the scabs off of long-dead slavery, and never-ending reminders and charges of Southern racism. Those who have only one card to play must play it for all it’s worth. In today’s climate of Progressive Identity Politics, it is easy to twist Black history into Progressive Identity Politics propaganda. I would therefore like to offer some points for consideration that might put some of these matters in a proper historical perspective. Let me begin with slavery.
Slavery is as old as history. The Laws of Moses codify it in Leviticus, Chapter 25, and the way slavery was practiced in America before it was abolished was closely in accordance with the Laws of Moses. In Virginia, we are noting the 400th anniversary of slavery being brought to our shores. The first cargo was purchased as indentured servants, but subsequent rulings codified perpetual bondage for some. One of the first slave owners in Virginia was a freed Black African named Anthony Johnson, who – at the end of his indenture - owned a tobacco plantation and slaves on the Eastern Shore. His was not an unusual circumstance, even after the Colonial period, although Blacks were prohibited by law from owning White – or “Christian” – slaves. “[S]lave-owning by free Negroes was so common in the period of the Commonwealth as to pass unnoticed and without criticism by those who consciously recorded events of the times.”
While the New England Puritans enslaved Native Americans (with poor success) we might claim that the Whites of the South – while they purchased, owned, and traded in slaves - did not actually enslave anyone. However, as the above shows, in changing an indenture of a limited period of service to an indenture for life, that claim is not technically true. But while it is true that Whites of the South obtained slaves by purchase from Northern and European slavers and not from capture or slave-raiding, the actual enslavement of the African race was done by the Africans themselves. Zora Neale Hurston, the noted Black anthropologist, interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last known living survivor of the African Slave-trade to the United States, who told his harrowing tale of capture by the slavers of the Kingdom of Dahomey, which Hurston recorded in her book Dust Tracks on a Road, and in her more recent book Barracoon. After hearing his story, Hurston stated that in spite of the fact that White people had purchased and exploited her people, the “inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had sold me and the White people had bought me.” But the White people in the Age of Discovery had found slave markets already in operation on the coast of Africa, and took advantage of this source of labor to develop the colonies of the Caribbean and Brazil, and later in North America. Africa was the home of slavery before the Europeans arrived, and – according to the anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel – it still is, with slavery being practiced in over two-thirds of the sub-Saharan cultures.
Slavery was first brought to our Colonial shores by the European Colonial powers. Early on, however, Virginians perceived the dangers and the iniquity of it all and sought to put an end to the traffic. The Virginia Legislature time and again tried to put prohibitive duties on the traffic, but Britain always vetoed the legislation. It was not until after American independence that the African Slave-trade was abolished by the US Constitution in 1809.
However, the Constitutional abolition of the African Slave-trade did not stop traders in the US. Although the British Navy patrolled the Slave Coast, Yankee smugglers evaded them regularly, and the Stars and Stripes proved to be an excellent talisman for vessels wishing to avert search and seizure. At the time of the election of Lincoln and the breaking-out of war, New York and New England dominated the trade, carrying mostly to Brazil and Cuba. The January 1862 Continental Monthly stated: “The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections…” John Brown of Rhode Island (not the John Brown of Harpers Ferry), founder of Brown University with money he made from his African Slave-trading, once said that in his opinion “there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.” When will that distinguished Ivy League University own up to its founding?
It might be inferred here, and correctly so, that the South held no monopoly on racism. In fact, the North passed “Jim Crow” laws long before the War Between the States, and long before the South passed her laws after Reconstruction. Lincoln’s Illinois prohibited Blacks from entering the State, either bond or free. John Randolph of Roanoke, Old Virginia statesman, bought land in Ohio and bequeathed it to his people for their settlement after he manumitted them in his will, but when they went to settle, the people in Ohio ran them out of the State and stole their land. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the Northern States abolished slavery for its inutility in their industrializing economy, but they did not free any of their slaves. They sold them South before the Abolitionist laws went into effect, thus ridding themselves not only of an undesired labor system, but of an undesired population as well. In his well-known classic Democracy in America, Tocqueville noted that “the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” The heated issue of slavery in the Territories, which did so much to provoke the secession of the seven States of the “Cotton Kingdom” at the election of Lincoln and the “Radical Republicans,” was strongly opposed by the White people of the North, not because it would spread the institution of slavery into the Territories, but because it would spread the Black population into the Territories. The Territories at the time either prohibited Blacks from residing within their borders, or required them to post a prohibitive bond for their good behavior.
Lincoln himself, the “Great Emancipator,” was a White Supremacist who was an advocate until the day he died of deportation out of the country of the freed Black population through the Colonization Society. To a delegation of prominent African Americans who called on him during the War, Lincoln said: “And why should the people of your race be colonized, and where? … You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer side by side. If this be admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.” Lerone Bennett, Jr., once editor of Ebony magazine, stated that between 1854 and 1860, Lincoln said on at least fourteen occasions he believed the Black race was inferior to the White. Bennett elaborates in detail in his book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000). While we are busy vandalizing and removing Confederate monuments for specious allegations, what shall we do, then, about the Lincoln Memorial?
As for “Lynch Law,” the South holds no monopoly on that, either. In 1741 seventeen slaves were hanged and thirteen burned at the stake for an insurrection in New York. And while the Virginia legislature has recently voted unanimously to express “profound regret” for the lynching of 80 people between 1877 and 1950, between 100 and perhaps as many as 1,000 Free Blacks were lynched from lamp posts in one week during the July 1863 New York Draft Riots, in addition to the Colored Orphan Asylum being burned to the ground. This of course in no way exonerates Virginia or anyone else, North, South, or West, from this or any other lawless behavior, but only exhibits the sad fact that all mankind is capable of sin.
So what of our Confederate monuments? As Edmund Burke said, you are gibbeting the carcass while your house is the haunt of robbers.
"History is the propaganda of the victorious," said Voltaire, and such has it permeated our modern-day interpretation of the so-called "Civil War" that Progressive Identity Politicians and radical leftists are foaming at the mouth, posting their virtues, and calling for the destruction of all things Confederate, while Southerners and descendants of Confederate soldiers are crying mea culpa, rolling in the dust, and covering themselves in sackcloth and ashes. It is unbecoming of descendants of men who were fighting to defend their country from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance, just as their forefathers had done in 1776, when the thirteen slaveholding Colonies seceded from the British Empire. Perhaps this true perspective of history will assuage their guilt – and, if the Truth means anything to the self-anointed, intolerant Elect who hate these Confederate soldiers and their descendants, perhaps it will temper their own intolerance and their own hate. Let us hope so, for who made these Latter-day Cains their brothers’ keepers?
The war was not the evil South's war to defend slavery or the righteous North’s war to free the slaves, as the “propaganda of the victorious” would have it. The North admitted it in the New York Times: “Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision. It has disappeared almost entirely from the political discussions of the day. No one mentions it in connection with our present complications. The question which we have to meet is precisely what it would be if there were not a [N]egro slave on American soil.”
Follow the dollar. With “King Cotton” out of the Union the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would suffer financial disaster, so Lincoln launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot to get the war he wanted and drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union - and in the process, to transform the voluntary Union of sovereign States bequeathed us by the Founders into a coerced industrial Empire.
South Carolina responded to Lincoln’s provocation in Charleston Harbor just a Massachusetts responded to George III’s provocation at Lexington and Concord. It was Abraham Lincoln's war to prevent Confederate independence. Virginia, "The Mother of States and of Statesmen," proved it by her decision on April 17, 1861. When the secession crisis arose at the election of Lincoln, Virginia called a Peace Conference to try to hold together the Union she had given so much to create, but she warned Lincoln that any attempt at coercion would lead to war. Lincoln did not listen to Virginia. Instead, he rebuffed all Confederate overtures for peaceful diplomacy, and launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke the South into firing the first shot to get the war he wanted. He then called for troops from Virginia to help in his war to subjugate the “Cotton Kingdom.” Virginia, which had recently voted to remain in the Union, immediately voted to secede, while indicting Lincoln for inaugurating civil war. Four more States followed Virginia out of the Union. The rest is history, although it has been twisted into lies to conform to the identity politics of our multi-cultural Empire. But as Thomas Carlyle observed, “All lies are cursed and damned from the beginning.” We are seeing the results today.
A native of Lynchburg, Virginia, the author graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1967 with a degree in Civil Engineering and a Regular Commission in the US Army. His service included qualification as an Airborne Ranger, and command of an Engineer company in Vietnam, where he received the Bronze Star. After his return, he resigned his Commission and ended by making a career as a tugboat captain. During this time he was able to earn a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of Richmond, with an international focus on war and cultural revolution. He is a member of the Jamestowne Society, the Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Society of Independent Southern Historians. He currently lives in Richmond, where he writes, studies history, literature and cultural revolution, and occasionally commutes to Norfolk to serve as a tugboat pilot