"What Shall We Do with the Negro?": Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America

5: SLAVERY, WAR, AND THE SLAVEHOLDER’S MIND

five SLAVERY, WAR, AND THE SLAVEHOLDER’S MIND S outhern slaveholders gained wealth and power from human bondage , but the institution of slavery made their world complex. Living economically in a world of progress and profit, they were menaced ideologically by an Atlantic culture that increasingly condemned the foundation of their wealth. Loyal to a Revolutionary past that had managed to combine freedom and slavery, they encountered a changing present that steadily grew more hostile to that contradiction. In addition to this ceaseless and dangerous external criticism, internal doubts sometimes surfaced. Asserting that timeless truths supported slavery, slaveholders recalled that their region’s position on slavery had changed quite recently. Despite being aggressively self-righteous and confident, they knew occasional fears and insecurities that they tried to hide from themselves. Although deeply religious and reassured by the Bible, they sometimes questioned their own zeal in doing God’s will toward the slaves. Theirs was a world in which past and present, home and surroundings, internal and external realities did not meld completely. This persistent, irritating fact spawned an unremitting effort to justify the slaveholder’s way of life. White Southerners needed to repel external criticism and to remove those few, lurking internal doubts that all was well both at home and in the wider world. Feeling instinctively that they were every bit as good as their Northern critics, slaveholders searched for ideas that would support their society and protect them from economic loss or social condemnation. In the intellectual arena, considerable energy went into the elaboration of old, Bible-based proslavery arguments and the construction of new, more aggressive “scientific” or sociological ones.1 In the routine of daily life, planters and politicians sought an ideology that would serve both 146 southern developments personal and social goals. They found an answer: the ideology of paternalism buttressed by convictions of racism and prescriptions of religious duty. According to the claims of paternalism, Southern slave owners did more than supervise enslaved laborers who produced their wealth. They cared for and elevated an inferior race, treating slaves as members of a plantation family . They gave African Americans the guidance they needed and all the while advanced God’s plan for the salvation of Africa and the world. A relationship that rested on coercion became, in the ideology of paternalism, a trust and a benefit, a positive human partnership. Slavery was not exploitation but a mutually beneficial institution. Some claimed it was even a caring connection based on shared experience and familial affection.2 Individual Southerners emphasized different aspects of paternalism. Some stressed the idea of the dependency of an inferior race and the stability of an organic society, while others talked most of their religious duty, and still others celebrated the bonds of affection within the “family, black and white.” But for all, these efforts involved at least some small measure of self-deception. Holding human beings in bondage fell short of the Golden Rule, and slaves were seen as racial inferiors, not as sons or daughters, brothers or sisters. Slaves certainly made money for their owners, while masters supposedly “elevated” the heathen African while denying him education, marriage, and freedom. Familial bonds did not preclude cruelty or whipping , punishment by slave patrols, or swift suppression of suspected revolts. Such unpleasant facts were known and discussed in Southern society, if infrequently . Thus, in regard to slavery, Southern culture depended on habits of mental avoidance. External denial and internal reassurance were required for slaveholders’ self-image and the perceived health of their society. The experience of the Civil War first undermined and then pierced these mental and cultural myths. Although there was no major slave revolt in the Confederacy, white Southerners feared violent uprisings and endured a progressive loosening of their control over the slaves. In the changed conditions of war, familiar bondsmen and bondswomen began to act in unfamiliar ways. The loyal became disloyal or undependable. Tried-and-true family servants now were recognized as strangers in the house, hiding behind inscrutable masks. War exposed the limited and false foundations of paternalism, and the most convinced paternalists suffered the most painful disillusionment. Dismay, surprise, and a sense of betrayal spread through the plantations’ “big houses,” as these powerful emotions revealed the extent of slaveholders’ dependence on the comforting conventions of paternalism. Slavery, War, and the Slaveholder’s Mind 147 Many could not give up the ideas they had relied upon in...