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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 87
condoned by the Bible and by the “laws of nature,” and that “free society,”
in contrast, was a violation of those laws.
More and more boldly as the conflict drew nearer, churchmen, writers,
and statesmen of the South came out against the principle of equality as
formulated in the Declaration of Independence. This principle came to
be ridiculed as a set of empty generalities and meaningless abstractions.
Common experience and everyday observation showed that it was wrong.
Indeed, it was “exuberantly false, and arborescently fallacious”:
Is it not palpably nearer the truth to say that no man was ever born free and no
two men were ever born equal, than to say that all men are born free and equal?
. . . Man is born to subjection. . . , The proclivity of the natural man is to domineer
or to be subservient.’^
Here we should recall that Jefferson and his contemporaries, when they
said that men were equal, had meant it primarily in the moral sense that
they should have equal rights, the weaker not less than the stronger.®
This was fundamentally what the South denied. So far as the Negroes were
concerned, the South departed radically from the American Creed. Lincoln
later made the matter plain when he observed that one section of the coun-
try thought slavery was right while the other held it to be wrong.
The militant Northern Abolitionists strongly pressed the view that
human slavery was an offense against the fundamental moral law. Their
spiritual ground was puritan Christianity and the revolutionary philosophy
of human rights. They campaigned widely, but most Northerners—sensing
the dynamite in the issue’and not liking too well the few Negroes they had
with them in the North—kept aloof. In the South the break from the
unmodified American Creed continued and widened. Free discussion was
effectively cut off at least after 1840. Around this central moral conflict
a whole complex of economic and political conflicts between the North and
the South grew up.* The most bloody contest in history before the First
World War became inevitable. De Tocqueville’s forecast that the abolition
of slavery would not mean the end of the Negro problem came true. It
is with the American nation today, and it is not likely to be settled
tomorrow.
It should be observed that in the pro-slavery thinking of the ante-bellum
South, the Southerners stuck to the American Creed as far as whites were
concerned’^ in fact, they argued that slavery was necessary in order to
establish equality and liberty for the whites. In the precarious ideological
situation—^where the South wanted to defend a political and civic institu-
tion of inequality which showed increasingly great prospects for new land
exploitation and commercial profit, but where they also wanted to retain
the democratic creed of the nation
—
the race doctrine of biological inequality
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