A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional PartyDabney, Robert Lewis
History
A Defence of Virginia: And Through Her, of the South, in Recent and Pending Contests Against the Sectional Party
Dabney, Robert Lewis
Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; Slavery -- United States -- History; Slavery -- Virginia
They hate us because they suppose
we possessed a privilege of which they were deprived. The angry and
divisive tendencies of abolitionism have manifested themselves but too
familiarly in the rending of churches, in the awakening of fierce
contention wherever it has appeared, in the destruction of the union
both of law and of love between the American States, and in a gigantic
war which has filled a continent with woe and crime. And the remaining
trait of "railings" is verified by the fact that these professed
friends of humanity have exhausted the most inhuman stores of
vituperation upon a class of Christian people whom none can know
without loving for their purity and benevolence. There is no sect that
knows how to scold so virulently as the Abolitionists. The apostle
adds that they are "men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth."
Now it is notoriously the fact that this sect, although claiming to be
the special advocates of righteousness, have ever prosecuted their
ends by unprincipled and false means. Their party action has been
hypocritical and unscrupulous. Their main weapons have been slanders.
And the tendency to mendacity has since been illustrated on a scale so
grand in the recent War, by falsifications of fact, diplomatic
treacheries, and wholesale breaches of covenant, that the accuracy of
the apostle's description becomes startling. It would seem that when
once a man is swayed by this spirit fully, he is under a fatality to
speak untruth, whether he be prime-minister, historian, official of
government, or divine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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