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April 10, 2005
Honoring traitors
I had an entire post ready about how some people here in the South love to honor their traitorous heritage. Then I read this editorial from today's Knoxville News Sentinel.
Idea that slaves served Confederacy out of love, devotion absurdBy BY THEOTIS ROBINSON, SPECIAL TO THE SENTINEL
April 10, 2005That anyone would contend African Americans, held as slaves in the South, would willingly take up arms to defend slave masters and to keep themselves in bondage is incredulous. But that is what Edward Bardill would have us believe. In an article that appeared in this newspaper on Feb. 27, Bardill decried the lack of recognition during Black History Month "of black Confederates who served and fought to defend their homeland." What homeland?
"Deep devotion, love of homeland and strong Christian faith joined black and white Confederate soldiers in defense of their homes and families," wrote Bardill. "The most amazing fact concerning black Confederates is that they served alongside their white brothers in arms while their Union counterpoints were kept separate in all-black units led by white officers."
Let's be clear. Racism in this country has never had any relevance to the Mason-Dixon line. The commerce of slavery was integral to the economy of the North through shipping, banking, insurance and sugar- and cotton-related industries just as it was to the plantation owners of the South. At the birth of our Union, when Thomas Jefferson was proclaiming, "All men are created equal," slavery was legal in all 13 states.
As Malcolm X said many years later and was just as applicable in Jefferson's day, "Everything below the Canadian border is the South." There were few whites, North or South, willing to accept blacks as their equals. It is not surprising that black and white Union soldiers fought in different units.
But neither is it surprising that any blacks within the Confederate ranks would be in integrated units. White Southerners had long feared slave rebellions. From the inception of slavery through the end of the Civil War, real and imagined slave revolts had bedeviled slave holders, filling them with fear that they would someday be held accountable by slaves for the brutalities they had visited upon them.
The 1791 slave revolt in Haiti did not go unnoticed on the plantations of the South nor in the seat of government in Washington. In that Caribbean nation, African slaves slaughtered white slave owners in a bloody revolution that ultimately led to Haiti's independence from France.
The most famous American slave revolt occurred in Virginia. In 1831, Nat Turner commanded a band of slaves in a revolt that saw more than 60 whites killed, including the owner -- and his family -- of the plantation where Turner lived. More than 100 slaves and freedmen were also killed as a result. Such revolts were not limited to Virginia.
Before slavery was ended in the North, revolts spread throughout the New England states and also across the South. Fear of slave uprisings were widespread among whites and led to the passage of increasingly repressive laws against blacks. Still, the desire to be free drove many blacks to seek freedom by any means available -- escape if possible, revolt if necessary.
Against this backdrop, it is more than a little difficult to believe that blacks would voluntarily take up arms to defend a system that had brutalized and reduced them and their families to nothing more than mere chattel for more than two centuries. While people differ on why the Civil War was fought, the question of slavery was central to the conflict. The words of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, are informative.
"Our government is founded ... upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition," said Stephens.
Second only to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, Stephens helped write the Confederate constitution which declared there could be no law enacted denying or impairing the right of whites to own slaves.
During the Revolutionary War, the British sent convulsions through the colonies, especially the Southern colonies, when they offered freedom to any slave willing to take up arms against the Americans. Thousands heeded the call. And what did the Confederates offer slaves in return for fighting against the Union? Eternal slavery. To believe that slaves found that call compelling flies in the face of logic.
Bardill claims "that between 50,000 to 60,000 (blacks) served in the Confederate units ... as cooks, musicians and even combatants." Based on 1860 U.S. Census data, only 3.4 percent of the black men of fighting age in the Confederate states were free. This suggests that fewer than 2,000 free blacks served the Confederacy and still fewer likely took up arms. It is one thing to be compelled to cook and quite another to fight against your own liberation.
The article by Bardill encourages the myth of "happy pickaninnies" down on the plantation picking cotton, singing "Ole Man River," satisfied to be beaten or killed at the whim of the plantation owner, having their wives, mothers and daughters raped whenever it pleased the "massa" and having their families ripped apart on the auction block.
That is the system he would have us believe slaves willingly took up arms to defend. It is more plausible that the Earth is flat, that there really is a tooth fairy and that the moon is made of green cheese.
Theotis Robinson is vice president of equity and diversity at the University of Tennessee. His e-mail address is thewriteroped@comcast.net.
Well put sir.
Posted by Paul Witt at April 10, 2005 01:19 PM