Anti-secessionists vs Patrick Henry

November 16, 2012

I know that Patrick Henry is no stranger to the average guest on SNN, but I never tire of hearing his most famous speech. Furthermore, I think that he may be of aid to us today. Perhaps we should blanket sites with video of his speech and ask those who oppose us to debate with Patrick Henry, not with us. Can we make any greater speech than the one he already made?  It’s like it’s practically already tailored to us. All one has to do is change a few words like British to more appropriate terms and it fits.

Below is the quintessential secession argument both in audio and text form.

Click here for the video

A statue of the famous Southern secessionist & anti-Federalist leader Patrick Henry

No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope that it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen, if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.

This is no time for ceremony. The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?

For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth — to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House?

Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with these warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation — the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motives for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies?

No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer on the subject? Nothing.

We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer.

Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament.

Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne. In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope.

If we wish to be free — if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending — if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak — unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance, by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?

Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable — and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, “Peace! Peace!” — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Patrick Henry – March 23, 1775

The tropical origins of South Carolina

By the league of the South

In recent months we have studied rather extensively the Caribbean roots of the Lower South and the plantation system which came to have such a cultural and economic impact on the Southern people. As informative as the facts are, it is nice to hear a story told particularly well. Southern professor and writer Ulrich Bonnell Phillips does just that in his 1929 book Life and Labor in the Old South. His summary on pages 47-48 of the Caribbean origins of the culture which spread out from Charleston, South Carolina is excerpted below. It is hoped that readers will enjoy his older prose:

The tale of South Carolina is in remarkable contrast to that of her northward sister, partly because the main impulse for her settlement came from a tropical source. An extraordinary congestion in Barbados, the most easterly of the West Indies, had made that little island a potential mother of new colonies. To it had gone thousands of English during the Cromwellian disturbances who had instituted a simple farming regime. But a recourse to sugar production had shortly brought a swarm of slaves and an engrossment of land into plantation units, which pinched out many small proprietors and impelled some larger ones to look abroad for greater spaces. Thus it came about that Sir John Colleton, returning to England from residence in Barbados, enlisted six powerful courtiers to join him and Sir William Berkeley in a Carolina proprietary venture.

…The nucleus of South Carolina was duly planted in 1670 on Charleston Harbor, though the first site of “Charles Town” soon gave place to the sandy neck across Ashley River where the city now stands. The settlement gained permanence and expansion through solid immigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, New England and New York, Germany and Switzerland, and notably from France and the West Indies. Some of these elements, particularly the thrifty Huguenots on Cooper and Santee rivers, maintained cultural distinctions for a time in separate clusters, but a gradual blending despite much dissension brought all the white people eventually into a single integrated community, with the West Indian elements contributing perhaps the major features in law and custom.

Also see: The Barbadian influence on Carolina, Caribbean origins of Southern plantation system, Barbados transformed by plantation system and The French in colonial Carolina

Dixie & the ‘tropical’ civilisation

By The League of the South

As part of our examination of the origins of Southern culture and identity we recently looked at the perspective of military historian Raimondo Luraghi as expressed in his book The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South. Luraghi argues that the Old South was part of what he calls a ‘seigneurial’ civilisation. This concept is a bit more sweeping than the Golden Circle concept we have developed over the last year. Luraghi asserted that New England and the Mid-Atlantic States were the exception to the rule in the New World and that Brazil, the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, New France and the Old South could all be seen as sharing a common civilisation. This would seem to be a stretch, although Luraghi is correct that these societies did have certain important traits in common.

In the short excerpt below Luraghi contrasts his seigneurial civilisation to the ‘tropical’ or ‘plantation’ civilisation concepts proposed by other historians. The latter concepts are precisely what we have described as the Golden Circle, reviving the term used by many nineteenth century Southerners. Luraghi writes on page 45:

Virginia, like Canada part of seigneurial America, was a member of a more specific kind of seigneurial civilisation that extended from Chesapeake to Brazil, including the Caribbean and, in part, the Spanish Main. This civilization was adroitly called by Gilberto Freye “tropical”; and the distinguished Brazilian writer is certainly right, as its extension covers a tropical and two subtropical areas, reaching as far as the temperate zones. However, it seems more appropriate to use Jay R. Mandle’s definition of “plantation civilizations” so that Canada and the Hacienda civilization of the Mexican high plateaus and Argentina’s large land properties, which presented very similar dimensions, can also be included. Mandle correctly underlines the fact that everywhere the end of slavery “…did severely shake the hegemony of the plantocracy, but its survival under formally changed circumstances of labor control, in several different countries, indicates that judicial ownership of people could be eliminated and yet the essential attributes of the plantation society could be retained.”

Certainly what Mandle calls “plantation civilization,” and what I propose to call seigneurial civilisztion, far exceeded the slave era both in space and time; and slave societies appear to be only the tropical species of such civilization.

It is interesting to note that these historians see the distinct civilisation of the Golden Circle area as surviving (to at least some degree) the fall of slavery. Of course, this was not true for all of the plantation societies. In Haiti, for example, the French population and civilisation itself were destroyed in a slave revolution. However, in Dixie, Brazil and elsewhere, the founding peoples of these societies did manage to survive the destruction of the social and economic system which had made these places among the wealthiest societies on Earth.

The plantation system had Iberian roots, developed on Portuguese and Spanish islands in the eastern Atlantic, was transplanted to Brazil, was taken to Barbados and the Lesser Antilles and was finally brought to Dixie.

Southern defence of civilisation & inequality

By the League of the south

Antebellum -era Southern plantation home in Beech Island, SC

In the 1850s, as we have seen, the United States’ economy was dominated by the production from Southern plantations. Southern cotton, for example, accounted for three-quarters of the world’s production of this commodity and comprised sixty percent of all US exports. This does not even take into consideration Southern sugar, rice and food production. Yet, despite their prosperity, Southerners (who had been on the defencive since the late 1820s) increasingly saw themselves as a besieged people and civilisation. Their concerns were not without reason; the basis of their economy and social order was under assault everywhere, it must have seemed.

ANTI-SLAVERY MOVEMENT IN THE AMERICAS

As Northern professor David Brion Davis (who writes with a moralising and overtly anti-Southern bias) notes on page 142 of his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World:

In 1775… [slavery] was a legal institution from Canada to Chile, and there were no restrictions on the expanding slave trade from Africa to most parts of the New World, but by 1825 Britain and the United States had outlawed their Atlantic slave trades.

The British pressured other European colonial powers into banning the slave trade as well. In Central America, Mexico and American States from Maine to Pennsylvania, slavery was prohibited. Davis continues on page 143:

Thus in 1830 slavery was a vital and thriving institution only in Brazil, Cuba, and the southern United States (as well as in the vast Islamic world, parts of India, and most of Africa).

An institution and social order that only a few decades before had been widely accepted across the entire Western Hemisphere (and much of the planet throughout the course of human history) was suddenly confined to just a few (highly productive and wealthy) regions. Davis attributes this sudden reversal to ideology, specifically ‘the ideals of liberty and equalityassociated with secular republican principles’ and the rise of evangelical Christianity.

BRITISH GEO-POLITICS AND ANTI-SLAVERY

It was the British who took the lead in promoting anti-slavery not only in Great Britain but also in their colonies and even in foreign countries. While there were many in the grass-roots abolitionist movement who were influenced by idealistic notions of human equality which sprang  from the Enlightenment era, to understand why anti-slavery was adopted as a state policy by the British government we must consider the geo-political implications. Dr Dale Tomich describes this for us in his essay ‘From Abolition to Emancipation’ which appears as chapter twenty in The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its People, edited by Stephan Palmie and Francisco Scarano:

The abolition of the slave trade was caught up in the politics and policies of the British state.

…Britain’s unilateral, persistent, and vigorous pursuit of anti-slavery as state policy… can be interpreted as an effort to restructure the Atlantic economy in accordance with British interests. Abolition of the international slave trade was instrumental in weakening the European presence in the Atlantic and in preventing rival states from reestablishing closed colonial economies in the Americas.

…International agreement on the abolition of the slave trade was a means to end US involvement in the legal and illegal slave traffic and to curb Britain’s only commercial and maritime rival in the Atlantic.

…It pursued a strategy of free trade and informal empire in the Americas and colonial domination in Asia….

Anti-slavery fit the geo-political goals of British elites and supported their imperialist ambitions while hurting other European colonial empires.

SOUTHERNERS WITNESS THE FAILURE OF CARIBBEAN EQUALITY

Antebellum Southern elites kept a close eye on developments in other plantation societies throughout the New World. They witnessed the genocidal slaughter of White colonists in the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent collapse of civilisation in that country. The worst  fear of Southerners was that the horror of Haiti would be duplicated in Dixie. As Henry L Benning, a wealthy Georgia planter, lawyer, judge and his State’s secession commissioner to Virginia, described in an address to the Old Dominion’s legislature in early 1861: ‘We will be completely exterminated… and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back  to a wilderness and become another Africa or St. Domingo.’ The South’s other secession commissioners gave similarly frank warnings about the destruction which would be brought upon their people if equality were forced upon the Southern States.

When Southerners looked at the plantation societies of the Caribbean they saw not onlythe racial warfare and genocidal slaughter in Haiti, they also saw the destruction that had been inflicted upon their kinsmen in the British West Indies. As Dr Tomich writes on page 315 of the Palmie and Scarano book:

In 1834 the British government abolished slavery…. The old colonies, including Jamaica, failed to successfully adapt to the new conditions and were condemned to continuing economic, social, and political crises. …After emancipation, the position of the colonies continued to deteriorate….

The utter failure of Britain’s experiment with equality in the once-prosperous Caribbean provided Southerners with valuable insight into what might transpire if such policies were pressed upon the South. Professor David Brion Davis writes on page 281 of his book:

[B]y 1843 Southern leaders were beginning to suspect that as a result of the failure of Britain’s “great experiment” of West Indian emancipation, Britain had strong economic motives to protect its own colonies by undermining slavery in the rest of the New World.

By 1861 one Southern woman could write to her cousin in England, arguing that the British West Indies had provided the South with a “window” for twenty-seven years – a window for viewing the total disaster of slave emancipation when British abolitionists won their way. By watching the British since 1834, she added, the South had learned that only resistance, even resistance in war, could prevent a West Indian-like collapse into social and economic ruin.

SOUTHERNERS EMBRACE INEQUALITY AS A POSITIVE GOOD

Their backs to the wall, Southerners took increasingly stronger positions against egalitarianism of the sort voiced by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson had been greatly influenced by the French Revolution and Enlightenment ideas, in the mid-nineteenth century Southern advocates were influenced by the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment. Rather than arguing from a defencive position for inequality (as Jefferson had done in his Notes on the State of Virginia) they began advocating inequality as a positive good upon which rested their civilisation. They also began to identify in Northern abolitionists the same qualities which they despised in British egalitarians. They saw the economic and social ruin of the British Caribbean and contrasted that to their own prosperity and social order. They began to not only equate equality with economic decline, increasingly they equated civilisation (based on the classical models of Egypt, Greece and Rome) with inequality. Given their in-egalitarian origins and the circumstances they faced, such a conclusion is hardly surprising. Davis writes:

[F]or a growing number of Southern leaders and publicists, the Northeast was becoming a perfect replica of the British enemy. Britain, these Southerners believed, had first exploited its own slave colonies, then ruined them under the influence of misguided humanitarianism, and had finally used antislavery as a mask of righteousness in assuming commercial and ideological domination of the world. And the industrializing Northeast, like England, was now employing millions of wage earners, most of them immigrants, was developing cast and squalid urban centers, and was gaining mastery over what Southern “agrarians” saw as the corrupting sources of credit and investment capital. Unless Dixie made its stand, it would therefore share the fate of the exploited, debt-ridden, and ravaged West Indies.

CONCLUSION

The once-highly prosperous Belt Belt of the South. Today, this is one of the poorest regions of the United States due to equality and democracy.

Were Antebellum Southerners correct in their view that prosperity and civilisation (especially in multi-racial, agrarian societies) rested upon inequality? We not only have the example of the utter collapse of civilisation in Haiti, which had been one of the wealthiest and most productive societies on the planet, we also have the example of the post-war South where poverty (and even starvation) reigned in a land which had only a few years prior been far more prosperous than the egalitarian North (or most of the rest of the world, for that matter). Civilisation essentially collapsed on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, in the Yucatan and in Suriname – all of which had been prosperous plantation societies. In fact, as a general rule, those areas which had been the wealthiest during the plantation economy era (including the Mississippi Delta, the Southern ‘Black Belt,’ Haiti, Suriname, much of northern Brazil, etc) are now among the poorer areas in the hemisphere. The Wikipedia article on the Black Belt makes this point:

[T]he rural communities in the Black Belt commonly face acute poverty, rural exodus, inadequate education programs, low educational attainment, poor health care, substandard housing, and high levels of crime and unemployment. While African-American residents are disproportionately affected, these problems apply broadly to all ethnic groups in the Black Belt.

Take a look at the once-safe and orderly cities of Birmingham, New Orleans, Atlanta, etc. Southern metropolises have become Third World centres of disorder, crime and poverty under the US-imposed policies of egalitarianism and democracy. The same is true of other cities throughout the former plantation societies of the Americas. Most of the entire region, once known to Southerners as the ‘Golden Circle,’ now suffers from the effects of egalitarianism and democracy. Far from the utopian results foreseen by the outsiders and social crusaders who pushed through these policies, the region today is plagued with rampant crime, corruption, poverty, unemployment and (in at least some areas) collapse. Egalitarianism has been a failure, at least for the native citizens, in Dixie and the Golden Circle region.

Miles & Rhett: Strategy for Southern secession

By the League of The South

William Porcher Miles

Along with Robert Barnwell Rhett and William Gilmore Simms, one of the strongest voices for Southern independence in the months and years leading up to secession was William Porcher Miles. As we have seen inan earlier article, Miles was one of the South’s most able leaders and as Mayor of Charleston and later as a US Congressman he championed an uncompromisingly Southern nationalist platform.

The debate over the admission of Kansas into the Union as either a Northern or Southern State was one of the key section issues in the years before secession. Another issue was an effort by Alabamian William Lowndes Yancey, South Carolinian Robert Barnwell Rhett and others to re-open the international slave trade. His strong pro-Southern stance on these and other issues won Miles the respect of his fellow Fire-Eaters and made him one of the leading Southern nationalists of the era. Professor Eric H Walther quotes Miles on page 283 of his book The Fire-Eaters as saying that Southerners were compelled to ‘choose subjugation or resistance, colonial vassalage or separate independence.’ The Charleston Mercury, edited by Rhett’s son, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr, praised Miles and a close alliance developed between the Rhetts and Miles.

One of the most interesting and important actions that Southern nationalists took during this period was in the critical year of 1860 before and during the Democratic convention in Charleston. Walther describes the plan on pages 288-289 of his book:

[W]hen Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr. suggested to Miles that splintering the Democratic party at the next national convention would help the states of the deep South control the fate of “inferior contemporaries,” he won Miles’ wholehearted agreement.”

Southern Democrats, led by the Fire-Eaters, nominated John Breckinridge of Kentucky to run for the US presidency, while Northern Democrats went on to nominate Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Miles then joined Rhett in campaigning for Breckinridge and urging Southerners to reject compromise. This split up the only party which had support in both the North and South, paving the way for Republican Abraham Lincoln to pull out a victory in a purely sectional vote. Though the Fire-Eaters hated Lincoln, they knew that nothing short of such a man taking the White House would push most Southern conservatives to support secession. The plan worked and South Carolina led the Lower South States in secession that winter. Miles was one of the delegates to the secession convention which voted to dissolve the union between the Palmetto State and the United States (with Rhett being the star of the convention). The Upper South States later followed their lead, resulting in an independent confederation of States stretching from Virginia to Texas. History might have been very different if Miles, Yancey and the Rhetts had not worked to split the Democratic Party.

War between South Carolina & Florida in 1686

By The League of The South

Settlers in early colonial South Carolina divided into partisan groups according to their class, economic and political interests, much as people do today. The most powerful faction at that time was a group called the Goose Creek Men. These wereEnglishmen with Barbadian roots (as were at least half of the Carolina colonists between 1670 and 1690) who wanted to see the colony function according to the model they had established and profited from in the Caribbean. Opposed to the Barbadians was a motley collection of religious dissenters who had been recruited by the colony’s proprietors. The dissenters, as Thomas J Little writes in his essay ‘The South Carolina Slave Laws Reconsidered, 1670-1700′ (originally published in the South Carolina Historical Magazine, April 1993 and recently republished in South Carolina and Barbados Connections: Selections from the South Carolina Historical Magazine), included ‘Huguenots, English Baptists, English and Scottish Presbyterians, and Quakers.’ The two factions, the Goose Creek Men and the pro-proprietary group, engaged in bitter political struggles throughout the first several decades of the colony’s existence.

Then, in 1686, a foreign invasion was thrust upon the Carolinians. Partisan divisions were set aside in the face of this attack, which originated from Spanish Florida. The Spanish troops came up through disputed Georgia to reach the South Carolina Lowcountry, but were fatefully set back by the sudden appearance of a hurricane. Little writes:

Party strife was soon forgotten when the Spanish launched a surprise attack on the exposed southern frontier in 1686. While moving toward Charleston, the invaders were forced to retreat after a hurricane ripped through their path. Nevertheless, the Spanish force managed to carry off ten slaves before heading home. A counter-attack was immediately planned by the Carolinians. Four hundred men were armed and two vessels were fitted out. This expedition was aborted when a new governor, James Colleton, arrived in the province. Colleton, who had recently come to the colony from Barbados, argued that the expedition could not be legally carried out because Spain had not formally declared war. To prevent another attack, he reopened communications with the governor of Florida and persuaded him to pay for the slaves who had been carried off.