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
A Clay, as much as a Calhoun, proclaimed that when abolition overthrew
slavery in the South, it also would equally overthrow the
Constitution. Calhoun, and other Southern statesmen, with a sagacity
which every day confirms, had forewarned us, that when once abolition
by federal aggression came, these other sure results would follow:
that the same greedy lust of power which had meddled between masters
and slaves, would assuredly, and for the stronger reason, desire to
use the political weight of the late slaves against their late
masters: that having enforced a violent emancipation, they would
enforce, of course, negro suffrage, negro eligibility to office, and a
full negro equality: that negro equality thus theoretically
established would be practical negro superiority: that the tyrant
section, as it gave to its victims, the white men of the South, more
and more causes of just resentment, would find more and more violent
inducements to bribe the negroes, with additional privileges and
gifts, to assist them in their domination: that this miserable career
must result in one of two things, either a war of races, in which the
whites or the blacks would be, one or the other, exterminated; or
amalgamation. But while we believe that "God made of one blood all
nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens," we know that the
African has become, according to a well-known law of natural history,
by the manifold influences of the ages, a different, fixed _species_
of the race, separated from the white man by traits bodily, mental and
moral, almost as rigid and permanent as those of _genus_. Hence the
offspring of an amalgamation must be a hybrid race, stamped with all
the feebleness of the hybrid, and incapable of the career of
civilization and glory as an independent race. And this apparently is
the destiny which our conquerors have in view. If indeed they can mix
the blood of the heroes of Manassas with this vile stream from the
fens of Africa, then they will never again have occasion to tremble
before the righteous resistance of Virginian freemen; but will have a
race supple and vile enough to fill that position of political
subjection, which they desire to fix on the South.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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