 racist slavery was said to cause miscegenation, whereas 100 years after the War racism was held to prevent miscegenation, now promoted as a positive good.
To these false and malign insults to Southern honor, and in true Southern form, a reactionary blow-back responded that marginalized any hope of a peaceful and gradual end to slavery through recolonization. Those most reactionary Southerners’ Southerners, the South Carolinians, proceeded to develop an elaborate ideology defending slavery as an explicit blessing instead of a necessary evil. James Henry Thornwell, the great Presbyterian theologian, took the lead on the moral front. He made the obvious case that slavery is explicitly authorized in the Bible, though he did advocate reforms of the system, notably preventing the separation of slave families and protection against capricious cruelty from masters. What is notable is the seriousness with which he advocated these reforms, even in the midst of reactionary feelings towards the abolitionists.
Dabney concurred with Thornwell’s belief that slave families should be protected from separation and their marriages recognized under law. However, Dabney was careful to point out that an institution’s deviations from an ideal form do not automatically undermine an entire institution. Note that slave family separations, while occasionally the intention of callous and cruel masters, were mostly initiated by creditors possessing a bankrupted estate, who legally had to auction every slave to the highest bidder. Like all farmers for all history, the Southern planters got excited by high crop prices, which resulted in overinvestment funded by debt, then oversupply, then a collapse in prices followed by a liquidation of assets by creditors of the most overextended estates. Dabney and Thornwell supported slightly abrogating the rights of slaveowners and their creditors such that slave families could not be separated. In Dabney’s sermon upon the death of Stonewall Jackson, he repeatedly refers to Jackson’s death as a consequence of the sin of the Southern people; one wonders what exactly he had in mind. It is dangerous business to not respect God’s law, because you never really know how much any one offense will spur Him to action (and offend him it does, as He is holy), as often God will use Canaanites like the Unitarian Yankees to discipline His people when they stray off course. Freehling reports that, at the moment of secession, Thornwell was visiting Europe, and when the news was delivered he immediately thought that the drive to secession was the road to ruin for South Carolina, and that the foolishness thereof was a punishment of God for the South’s refusal to reform slavery to both keep families together and allow the Gospel to be preached to slaves (while most masters allowed this, Thornwell thought that no master should have the legal authority to require a slave to work on the Sabbath, nor prevent a slave from attending church services). Thornwell immediately resolved to return home and advocate for gradual emancipation such that South Carolina, in his view, might escape war and God’s wrath, but he demurred upon observing the impossible political situation on his return. The moderate response of this South Carolian theologian, so important in the 1850’s for defending the morality of slavery, at the moment of secession contrasted greatly with the fire-eaters who worked on the political front.
Robert Barnwell Rhett provided early political agitation for secession through his newspaper, The Charleston Mercury. In the classic biography of Jefferson Davis by Eckenrode, Rhett is portrayed as the visionary who saw the South and its institutions doomed if it did not seek political independence, which was seriously considered in 1850 at the Nashville Convention; in 1850, before the massive waves of immigration providing fresh conscripts, accelerating industrialization of Northern manufacturing and modernization of the US Army under, ironically, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, it is likely the South could have easily have defeated any Yankee invasion. However, Davis was a Unionist at the time who derailed the plans of Rhetts’ radicals.
A young lieutenant of the early fire-eaters, a South Carolinian who moved to Alabama, was William L. Yancey. I will explore Yancey’s genius as described by Freehling in my next post, but suffice to say that the man was ideally positioned because he was a hybrid South Carolinian, radical in his policies but practical in his politics. South Carolina at the time was the last aristocratic republic of the 18th century, frozen in time 100 years later. To serve in the South Carolina legislature, a gentleman had to own property worth 10 slaves plus 500 acres. To be a state senator, the candidate was required to own 1000 acres, and to be governor, 2500 acres. South Carolina was the only state in 1860 where the legislature selected the governor, and also the only state where the legislature alone picked presidential electors, without input from voters. The South Carolina ethos was to put superior men in positions of authority and let them make decisions for their lessors. This was at least due to a greater English influence in South Carolina, where greater wealth (in the pre-Cotton era at least) enabled more of their gentlemen to receive English educations, and also the fact that the state itself was a colony of Barbados, whose culture was more of the British Imperial tradition than the colonial tradition of the United States.
I must confess that I simply love the state of South Carolina, its culture, its literature, everything about it. It’s everything that’s beautiful about New Orleans and Louisiana, minus the decadent Latin influence, an Englishman’s lowcountry culture. However, as we look into the self-image of the South Carolina elite, we start to see the essential problems. The South Carolina elites were self-consciously trying to reproduce the aristocratic system of England, the picture-perfect pastoral contentment that instantly lowers the blood pressure when I view a Jane Austen movie; biology, unfortunately, gets in the way, as there are real biological limits when the aristocratic society is comprised of blacks instead of white peasants. The coastal counties of South Carolina were often 80-90% black, which takes me to my final point. These Southern gentlemen, then, can be seen as noble but quixotic reactionaries who were the last vestiges of feudalism against the dehumanizing wave of materialistic modernism. Even if we grant that feudalism is a better mode of society, its advantages mostly lay in a better quality of community and cultivation, and so could not overcome the biological limits of Africans, nor the brute force of Yankee war manufacturing.
1. Blacks are definitively materially better off under white rule.
2. As a consequence of #1, blacks will have higher fecundity than whites. Less intelligent, less responsible individuals will always have more children, lacking the self-control to voluntarily limit births. White medical care guaranteed that more of these children would survive to adulthood than white children.
3. The reliance on cheap labor distorts the economy and begets more and more demand for additional cheap labor, a race to the bottom demographically.
4. Eventually, as in South Africa, the less intelligent racial groups overwhelm demographically. Once South Africa reached a tipping point it was impossible even for the very skilled Boers to keep the criminals in line. The extremely high ratio, in the contemporary world, of the destructive potential of cheap terrorism versus the extremely high cost of preventing it were contributory factors. See John Robb’s work for more on this. Essentially, modern societies are complex and fragile, with severely expensive and vulnerable choke points (like power distribution stations, water sanitation facilities, etc). As the Confederacy inevitably modernized with the rest of the Western world, a scary but containable Nat Turner Rebellion, especially supported by outside agitators, could easily become a successful terrorist organization like the ANC. It is entirely plausible that the slave codes enacted after Nat Turner were perfectly necessary, as the same literacy required to read the Bible could be used to read abolitionist propaganda. This serves as an additional demonstration that multicultural societies are inherently unstable and unjust (to both groups), as they are contrary to God’s Providence. Whites could not be reasonably be asked to consent to having their slaves read the Satanic propaganda of the abolitionists, but the injustice of preventing slaves from reading the Bible struck at the very heart of the North European sense of individual religious liberty, hard-won through the Reformation. The only solution to both wrongs was racial separation.
It asks too much of men to allow aliens to lead them. Any group of people, and as Kinists we must respect this instinct, would rather be ruled by a butcher and incompetent from among their own than the most benevolent alien. Just as we rightly oppose the ruling of our societies by arguably superior East Asians or Ashkenazi Jews, Africans oppose any attempts at European leadership, for they too feel the call of the blood that they alone, according to God’s decree of nations, should determine their collective fate as a society.
Perhaps there is another way for the white man to provide much-needed leadership to Africa and other Third World nations without triggering rebellion; the Cold War approach was the soft colonialism of the puppet dictator, who ruled over his own people while allowing Western countries to develop his country with the skills his natives lacked. While this worked in many cases, it also gave us fundamentalist Iran and Saddam Hussein; even puppets resent their strings it turns out. Nevertheless, these are mere speculations. The situation of the European race is currently too precarious to worry anymore about how to help the Third World. In fact, no help at all may be ultimately necessary; the free market, using white technology, is already doing a fabulous job of elevating the poor people of the world. Ethiopia, for example, has a 2008 life expectancy of