Swaggering buck niggers are to ogle them and elbow them. His wife and daughter are to be hustled on the street by black wenches, their equals. The poor man… reduced to the level of the nigger. And a race which posed a permanent terrorising threat to all decent white folk.Īs the Charleston Mercury put it, emancipation would mean: It is eye-opening to come to understand what institutional racism really means, in the sense of a quite overt, explicit, unashamed and widely popular belief, promoted by politicians from the (Confederate) president at the top, throughout the entire (Confederate) press – that black Africans are a separate and inferior race, quite incapable of education, higher thought, or serious mental activity, a race set aside by GOD specifically to perform the most menial, humdrum, mindless activities. Nowadays the word ‘racism’ is quickly applied to the slightest verbal slip or misspeak. In other words, McPherson gives you deep insight into the minds of people at every level of society on both sides of the war.Īnd one of the big things that comes over is a level of anti-black racism at all levels of 1860s American society which is staggering, almost beyond words to describe. It is one of the characteristics of McPherson’s immensely thorough account of the American Civil War that he lards his text with quotations – from speeches by presidents, senators and congressmen, from newspaper articles and editorials, from the diaries and letters on both sides of the argument, and statements from the lowliest, barely literate, farmhands-turned-soldiers. The idea was:Ī repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South… that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave. Here is the southern newspaper, the Richmond Whig, in 1865, discussing the heretical idea of arming the South’s slaves to fight for it. Repeatedly, every few pages in this long book, the reader is slapped in the face by quite breathtakingly racist statements made by all classes of Americans in the 1860s. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man that slavery… is his natural and normal condition. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were wrong if they meant to include Negroes among ‘all men’, said Alexander Graham after he had become vice president of the Confederacy. (From a petition sent to Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the 56th Virginia regiment against allowing black soldiers to fight for the Confederacy, quoted on page 836) Racism… Slavery is the normal condition of the negro… as indispensable to his prosperity and happiness… as liberty is to the whites.
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