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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 4. The Southern Defense Ideology
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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 443
presence of a lower race.”^^ The very basis of white men’s equality was
the drudgery of the black slaves. In the words of Governor J. H. Ham-
mond of South Carolina:
In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the
drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little
skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have or you
would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.
It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you
might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the
other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted
to the purpose of her hand. . . . We use them for our purpose and call them slaves.^®
The slaves were politically the wards of the whites and had no rights
against white society. Upon the basis of their labor, civilization could
flourish. A high civilization presumed a leisure class and its exploitation of
slaves. In the final reckoning, however, even the humble slaves were
getting their share of the fruits of that civilization. They were fed, clothed,
housed, guarded, and secured in all their needs by their paternalistic
owners who, in this wise social order, could have no other interests than
to care to the utmost for their welfare. Above this interest solidarity
between slaves and slave owners was the solidarity among white men only:
We have among us but one great class, and all who belong to it have a necessary
sympathy with one another; we have but one great interest and all who possess it are
equally ready to maintain and protect it.^^
As political ideologies go, this doctrine should not be denied high
qualities of structural logic and consistency. It is, of course, an upper class
philosophy. It is a rationalization of the interests of the one-fifth of the
Southern white population who owned slaves. In its higher spheres the
philosophy was hardly understandable to those without a high degree of
education. But its basic ideas could be grasped by all. As the conflict with
the North drew nearer, it became a regional creed which was pressed upon
everybody by all available social controls. It served the South during the
Civil War in the same manner as the concept and theory of ^Memocracy”
or ^‘the democratic way of life” served all America during the two World
Wars. ^^The parties in this conflict,” says the Presbyterian Dr. J. H.
Thornwell, who ejected his predecessor. Dr. Cooper, from the presidency
of the College of South Carolina for his ‘‘infidel” views, “are not merely
abolitionists and slaveholders—^they are atheists, socialists, communists, red
republicans, jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated
freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground
—
Christianity and atheism the combatants—^and the progress of humanity
the stake.”^^
Long before the Civil War started, the dissenters from the Southern
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