Suddenly, they never mentioned the God of slavery again. The Great Hush.

SHHHHH — We don’t talk about that God anymore.

Can you kill a God?

No.  But you can show it’s so fake that its own believers never mention Him again.  That’s what happened to the Southern “God of Slavery.”

What the South bragged about at the time, our history books don’t even mention now.  Slavery was very much a religious based enterprise, and could not possibly have thrived in the Southern US without it.

In fact, the “Bible Belt” got its start, ironically, from this fierce religious defense of slavery.  As Debow (of Debow’s Review) said in 1843, “God has completely silenced all opposition to slavery by His Holy Word.”

Well, God silenced opposition in the SOUTH — with the help of the draconian “anti-incendiary” laws, which set torture as the punishment for those who wrote openly, or even owned books, that questioned slavery.  Those preachers and people who were against slavery faced physical torture and jail if they spoke out against it.

The antebellum South shaped their world on this God — literally. The president and vice-president of the Confederacy both said slavery was the cornerstone of their nation.  Their wars, their economy, their religion, was based on this idea that God that ordained slavery — and that slavery must spread, like the gospel itself.

Robert E. Lee himself wrote that abolitionists “are trying to destroy the American Church.” That’s right — CHURCH.  Objections to slavery was met with the same basic response — slavery is “of God.”  Lee said only God could end slavery, because He ordained it.

Please don’t get me wrong — there were many great and kind people in the South.  But slavery was a vile, evil enterprise.  If you grew up as they were raised, you would of course believe much like they did.  Lee, and men like him, never heard a legal sermon against slavery, never read a legal book that contradicted slavery as being from God.  We seem to forget that now.

We all know, and would agree, that power corrupts.  Well, slavery was an astonishing power, and it corrupted the entire system of government and religion.

Books against slavery were banned, of course, ships were searched regularly for “contraband” — meaning books and pamphlets against slavery.  Preachers could not even own books against slavery — or they too were subject to not only arrest, but torture as well.

Stopping free religious speech corrupted everything. With religion unable to fill its moral role, unable to challenge evil, there was no power to stop slavery.  Religion became SUPPORTIVE of not just slavery, but even supported the torture of slaves.

A Southern “best-seller” was Slavery is Ordained of God by Pastor Ross.

The Bible, it said, condoned not only slavery, but the torture of slaves.  You can beat a slave woman to death — as long as she doesn’t die the same day you beat her. If she lives a day or two, and then dies from her injures, that’s fine.

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. (Exodus 21:20-21)

The Bible also implies that slave women must submit to the master’s sexual demands.  This is another scripture widely known at the time — but never mentioned now.

And remember, no one could preach otherwise.  There were very strong scriptural arguments against slavery — but such arguments were outlawed.

It was not always that way. Up to 1820, there were more anti-slavery publications in the South than in the North! But, as slavery grew, so did the threat of rebellion and the dangers of runaway slaves.  So slave owners, who took virtual control of all Southern governments, and most of the federal goverment, passed laws outlawing all speech and writing that was against slavery.

If you preached to Blacks, you had to have a special license from the government — and you had to agree only to preach obedience.

So slave owners were eager to “give the slave religion” because the only religion slaves could legally hear about was for total and absolute obedience — even to the violent, sadistic, and sexually perverse slave owners.

When you hear of Lee or Jackson giving their slaves “religious education” — as if it were out of the goodness of the master’s heart — this is what they were teaching.

So the power of religion was only used one way — to enforce slavery.  It was not legal or possible for it to be used to oppose slavery.

Most of us in the 21st century assume that our ancestors had freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press in the South.  Not so.  From 1820 on, slave owners enacted very strong laws against free speech and free religion.  See the book The Other South by Carl Degler.

Lee thought God would never have allowed slavery to prosper if it was not the will of God.  Therefore, because it exists, and because slave owners were the wealthy class, it must be of God.  That is all he was taught, from childhood on. What else could he believe?

To Southern leaders, the proof of God’s wish for slavery was not only in the Bible, it was also in their own wealth — and in the rapid increase of slaves.  As the governor of Florida wrote, the slaves’ “rapid increase in numbers is the highest testimony of the humanity of the owners.”

If you were against slavery, you were “against God and civilization” — said the Texas Declaration of Causes.

Lee said God intended slavery to be painful and cruel to slaves — that is how you teach slaves, Lee wrote.  Pain was “necessary for their instruction as a race,” wrote Lee.

Davis said slavery was a “Divine Gift of God” and that “God delivered the Negro unto us.”

Slavery was “sealed by the blood of Christ.” The “great moral truth” that “God ordained slavery” was the very basis of the the Confederacy said its vice president, Stephens.

…The Confederacy was essentially a government by the religious leaders, for the religious leaders.  There was no distinction between the government and God — very much like radical Islam.  Robert E. Lee accused those who spoke against slavery of “trying to bring down the American Church.”…Yet for all this religious emphasis, virtually none of this is taught in our schools.  Why?

AFTER THE ASS KICKING — A DIFFERENT GOD

Notice, however, that once Lincoln, Sherman, Grant, and the Union Army won — not one Southern leader ever said such nonsense again.

Not Lee; not Davis; not Bedford Forrest. Not Debow. Not any preacher; not any civil war veteran.

Not the most extreme; not the most timid.  In fact, even private citizens, Southern newspapers, Southern books, thereafter never said God told them to enslave Blacks or anyone else.

One day their entire lives, their status, their reason for doing everything — was God telling them to enslave Blacks.  But then Lee surrenders — and they never mention that God again.

Even in their private letters, there was a drastic change.  No more mention of this God that ordained slavery.  No more insistence that they were doing the work of the Lord to spread slavery.  Yet this idea filled their private correspondence before the war.

No one said they had to give up their God of Slavery.  The only condition to end the war was for the South to stop fighting it, and recognize the government in Washington.

But Southerners en masse, without communication, dumped this God of Slavery. Totally, instantly, and forever.

It’s as if a light switch was flipped, and suddenly, no more God of slavery.  What they screamed from the rooftops one day, they did not even whisper in private the next.

LINCOLN’S LASTING IMPACT

Lincoln’s lasting effect is not just the 13th Amendment… his most lasting effect was forever exposing the God of Slavery as a fake….  It’s unthinkable that anyone anywhere will again use the Christian faith to justify slavery….

All other things may change — we may see the U.S. fall into disunion, we may see all kinds of havoc and discord.  Lincoln’s efforts to keep the U.S. together may only last 200 years or less.

But his efforts to discredit the God of slavery will very likely be enduring.

Read the full article at Death of the Southern God

A review of Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward (Horace Liverwright, publishers); The American Mercury, 1928

THE DREADFUL title of this book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of man.

His imagination was the imagination of a respectable hay and feed dealer, and his virtues, such as they were, were indistinguishable from those of a police sergeant. Mr. Woodward, trying to be just to him, not infrequently gives him far more than he deserves. He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men. He was even a poor judge of other generals, as witness his admiration for Sheridan and his almost unbelievable underrating of Thomas and Meade. If he won battles, it was because he had the larger battalions, and favored the primitive device of heaving them into action, callously, relentlessly, cruelly, appallingly.

Thinking was always painful to Grant, and so he never did any of it if he could help it. He had a vague distaste for war, and dreamed somewhat boozily of a day when it would be no more. But that distaste never stayed his slaughters; it only made him keep away from the wounded. He had no coherent ideas on any subject, and changed his so-called opinions overnight, and for no reason at all. He entered the war simply because he needed a job, and fought his way through it without any apparent belief in its purposes. His wife was a slaveholder to the end.

At Appomattox he showed a magnanimity that yet thrills schoolboys, but before he became President he went over to the Radical Republicans, and was largely to blame for the worst horrors of Reconstruction. His belief in rogues was congenital, touching and unlimited. He filled Washington with them, and defended them against honest men, even in the face of plain proofs of their villainy.

Retired to private life at last, he sought out the worst scoundrel of them all, gave the fellow control of his whole modest fortune, and went down to inglorious bankruptcy with him. The jail gates, that time, were uncomfortably close; if Grant had not been Grant he would have at least gone on trial. But he was completely innocent. He was too stupid to be anything else.

Mr. Woodward, as I have said, is very generous to him. There is, on almost every page of this book, an obvious effort to make the best of his good impulses, and to gloss over his colossal imbecilities. Sometimes the thing comes close to special pleading: Freud and the unconscious have to be hauled in to make out a plausible case. There is some excuse for that attitude, for Grant, for all his faults and follies, was at least full of honest intentions. Like Almayer, he always wanted to do the right thing. The trouble with him was that he could seldom find out what it was.

Once he had got beyond a few elemental ideas, his brain refused to function. Thereafter he operated by hunches, some of them good ones, but others almost idiotic. Commanding his vast armies in the field, he wandered around like a stranger, shabby, uncommunicative and only defectively respected. In the White House he was a primeval Harding, without either the diamond scarf-pin or the cutie hiding in the umbrella closet.

He tried, in his dour, bashful way, to be a good fellow. There was no flummery about him. He had no false dignity. But he was the easiest mark ever heard of. It was possible to put anything over on him, however fantastic. Now and then, by a flash of what must be called, I suppose, insight, he penetrated the impostures which surrounded him, and struck out in his Berserker way for common decency. But that was not often. His eight years were scarlet with scandal. He had a Teapot Dome on his hands once a month.

Mr. Woodward’s portrait, despite its mercies, is an extraordinarily brilliant one. The military automaton of the “Memoirs” and the noble phrase-maker of the school-books disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic. Grant went to the high pinnacles of glory, but he also plunged down the black steeps of woe.

I don’t think that his life was a happy one, even as happiness is counted among such primitive organisms. He was miserable as a boy, he was miserable at West Point, and he was miserable in the old army. The Mexican War revolted him, and he took to drink and lost his commission. For years he faced actual want. The Civil War brought him little satisfaction, save for a moment at the end. He was neglected in its early days in a manner that was wormwood to him, and after luck brought him opportunity he was surrounded by hostile intrigue.

He made costly and egregious blunders, notably at Shiloh and Cold Harbor; he knew the sting of professional sneers; he quailed before Lee’s sardonic eye. His eight years in the White House were years of tribulation and humiliation. His wife was ill-favored; his only daughter made a bad marriage; his relatives, both biological and in-law, harassed and exploited him. He died almost penniless, protesting that he could no longer trust a soul. He passed out in gusts of intolerable pain. It is hard to imagine harder lines.

If, in this chronicle, he sometimes recedes into the background, and seems no more than a bystander at the show, then it is because he was often that in life. Other men had a way of running him — John A. Rawlins during the war, Hamilton Fish at Washington, Ferdinand Ward afterward.

His relations to the first-named are discussed in one of Mr. Woodward’s most interesting chapters. Rawlins was the Grant family lawyer at Galena, and had no military experience when the war began. Grant made him his brigade adjutant, and thereafter submitted docilely to his domination. Rawlins was a natural pedagogue, a sort of schoolmarm with a beard. He supervised and limited Grant’s guzzling; he edited Grant’s orders; he made and unmade all other subordinates. “I have heard him curse at Grant,” said Charles A. Dana, “when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do…. Without him Grant would have not been the same man.”

Gossip in the army went even further; it credited Rawlins with actually sharing command. “The two together,” said James H. Wilson, “constituted a military character of great simplicity, force and singleness of purpose, which has passed into history under the name of Grant.”

Rawlins gets his due in Mr. Woodward’s story, and so do many of the other great characters of the time, most of them already grown fabulous. The book shows hard study and great shrewdness. It would be hard to surpass, for sound sense, the analysis of Andrew Johnson’s vexed and murky personality in the twenty-fourth chapter, or the picture of the Negro freedman which follows it. Here is not only good writing; here is also a highly enlightened point of view. Mr. Woodward is a man of Southern birth and grew up in the midst of the Confederate katzenjammer, but there is no sign of it in his narrative. He is magnificently impartial. The fustian of the Federal patrioteers does not deceive him, but neither is he deceived by the blather of their opponents. He knows how to be amusing without departing from the strict letter of history. He conceals erudition beneath a charming manner. He has written a biography of great merit. It more than fulfills the promise of his Washington.

The American Mercury, September 1930

NO AMERICAN historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation? How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.

The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North. They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities, then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed. First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any Southern standard, are gentlemen.

If the war had gone with the Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there be any sign below the Potomac of their chief contributions to American Kultur–Ku Kluxry, political ecclesiasticism, nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal variety of wowserism. Such things might have arisen in America, but they would not have arisen in the South. The old aristocracy, however degenerate it might have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said. Charleston, which even now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.

My guess is that the two Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they’d have come to terms as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would have kept aloof–and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.

No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

Today the way out looks painful and hazardous. Civilization in the United States survives only in the big cities, and many of them–notably Boston and Philadelphia–seem to be sliding down to the cow country level. No doubt this standardization will go on until a few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York, take to open revolt, and try to break out of the Union. Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter today for every American of any noticeable decency. There are, to be sure, advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of people. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.